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A comment on The Alpha Myth: How captive wolves led us astray. Parent comment

Re:The Alpha Myth: How captive wolves led us astray by fenomas on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @01:07AM (#42849354)
> What's going on is you're not able to see how alphas apply to human society. You're not able to jump the intellectual gap to identify, "hey if packs of animals have alphas, what's the human equivalent?"

I literally just pointed out that if you are defining alpha to mean "leader" then it's meaningless to then claim that leaders are alphas. That was the comment.

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Re:The Alpha Myth: How captive wolves led us astray by earnestinger on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @01:37AM (#42849519)
> if you are defining alpha to mean "leader"

Could you elaborate what is the meaning of “alpha”? (I sense there is definition, that is being kept secret from me)

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Re:The Alpha Myth: How captive wolves led us astray by JumpCrisscross on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @02:30AM (#42849785)
> Could you elaborate what is the meaning of “alpha”?

There isn't a fixed definition [1]. Most definitions reference dominance, e.g. Merriam-Webster [2]. (Annoyingly, dominance also has different meanings in anthropology, animal ethology, sociology and common use.)

But due to the term being relatively new, adopted from animal ethology, co-tiopted by the memeverse and now being politically charged, you're basically walking into semantic ground zero by using the term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_and_beta_male

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alpha#word-histor...

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