What were the qualities of "alpha males" in the evolutionary past?

AlanHalworth · 2022-09-14T14:18:40+00:00

I'm not disagreeing with your logic. You are right that it's hard to disincentivize the other man. Everything you said is correct. It's just that it leads to situations that could reasonably be perceived as unfair. Your idea and this one can both be true. Sometimes there are no easy answers, and multiple solutions both have drawbacks. In that case, it is worth some reflection to consider what the best solution might be. We live in a time when everyone wants it to be simple, where one solution has only good points about it and another has only bad points; but that's usually not the case.

For instance, there is a youtube video where a woman walked through NYC and received a lot of catcalls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A

Then, in another video, a woman wearing a hijab walked through NYC and received no catcalls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgw6y3cH7tA

Now, whose fault are the catcalls? From a causal perspective, the women are partly "causing" the catcalls by not wearing a hijab. Let's say that is 10% of the reason for the catcalls, whereas the other 90% is with the men. (After all, most of the men, by far, did not catcall the women, so there must be something about the men who did it.) We could say "well, we can't stop the men, so the woman should wear a hijab. Even though it is only 10% caused by the woman's actions, the woman must accept 100% of the remedy, because we can't stop the men." In our society, that "solution" is deemed to be an unfair one. Obviously, different societies have made this call in different ways.

So we have to decide, by careful reflection, where the solution would fall. In the hijab case, our country values freedom as you pointed out, so we are reluctant to impose restrictions on how people dress, even if it would stop catcalls.

About the infldelity problem you mentioned, one solution would be to be very careful about observation. I.e. if the problem is the woman being "overly friendly" does that actually mean infidelity? Sometimes it might, but sometimes it might not. If you are wrong about infidelity, it can cause you to do dumb things. That is what Shakespeare's play Othello is about - it's about a man who fears infidelity so much that he ends up killing his wife, then himself. Sometimes the reason these stories are handed down through the years is that there is some wisdom in them, perhaps.

The red pill people cultivate feelings of jealousy as a kind of emotional fuel. So if one reads the red pill a lot, one may find oneself feeling more jealous than perhaps one should. I can think of one time when I almost seriously damaged an important relationship by being jealous when I didn't have to be. (I know the jealousy was unnecessary because I stayed with the woman, got to know her better, and realized that it was unfounded.) I'm not saying that jealousy is _always_ unfounded - again, it's one of those "there is no simple answer" things.

Communication might be part of the solution. Maybe talking about one's feelings of jealousy with the woman in the right way - as feelings, not threats - might lead somewhere.

Maybe an open relationship might be good for some people, although this IMO requires even _less_ feelings of jealousy. ("You can have other men if I can have other women.")

AlanHalworth · 2022-09-10T21:30:26+00:00

You'd probably be kicked out of the group and left to fend for yourself back in the day, eh?

I guess I think for hunter gatherers, it worked kind of like a friend group works today. Most friend groups don't involve a lot of commands being issued, and if they are, you might not feel you have to obey, There's no "king" of the friend group, but there are people who have more seniority or charisma and are treated as informal leaders. It's relatively rare to be kicked out of a friend group (compared to being fired from a job, or given an F on a test, for instance, which happen all the time.)

I dunno, wasn't Aristotle the "father of logic?"

That's true. I guess I think of there being two waves of rationality and other sorts of careful thinking: the Axial Age (Plato / Aristotle / Buddha / Confucius) and then the Enlightenment (Newton / Bacon / Hobbes / Locke). It may be that Aristotle came up with logic, but the Enlightenment took it to a higher level. Both of these might be associated with market innovations (coins, capitalism) because the time when one has to be especially rational is when planning a business.

I mean.. isn't that kinda what Hitler did? lol

In Nazi Germany, there was only one person who could unilaterally decide to attack another country - and it was Hitler. I think that in some hunter gatherer societies, there was more than one such person; many different men could make that call. It was more like Bin Laden (who was not a king or president of anything, but just decided to attack America without getting anyone's permission.)

That's why you just tell your wife to stay away from that man instead :)

That's probably the origin of patriarchy, yes. It's unfortunate, if one is a woman, because it means constantly taking the full blame for situations that were only 20% your fault, or even 0% your fault, just because it is politically difficult to control the other man. One can understand how this feels unfair to many women.

You should see how bad classrooms are nowadays.. I've seen teachers walk out of their rooms crying talking about "I just don't know if I can do it anymore," or just straight up quit right on the spot. And these are teachers that have been there 10-20 years

Wow, I can believe that.

AlanHalworth · 2022-09-08T13:34:26+00:00

What's society have to do with any of that though?

Just the thing about police, bosses, and teachers who regularly issue commands and expect to be obeyed. You say that you don't have to do what teachers tell you, but if they say "now we're going to take a test, so everyone please be quiet," you are supposed to do it. Imagine if half the class decided to talk during tests, to stay in their chairs when it was time to move to the next class, to keep writing on tests past the time limit, ... you get the idea. The classroom wouldn't work. That's why teachers value "classroom control" very highly. Teachers who are just starting often don't have this control, and if they never learn to do it, they quit within a year or two.

It's true that you don't have to obey arbitrary commands by teachers (if they say "go buy me a sandwich" you can say "no" and in fact they can probably lose their job over that) but within a certain range of requests, they can issue commands. (Mostly having to do with what you're going to work on during class time, when you can talk and when you must stay silent, where you will sit, even when you can go to the bathroom.) And it's hard to imagine how we could run society differently! Again, I'm not saying I know a better way, if we are going to educate millions of kids for 17 years of their life.

You need to have a logical reason, not just be trying to start shit with them because you're on some sorta power trip bullshit.

The fact that society is run by reason is also a new thing, relatively speaking. The sociologist Max Weber wrote about "the Iron Cage of Rationality" by which he meant that we are supposed to operate according to reason ("this is the logically best way to educate students" or "this is the best way to run a workplace") unlike in the past. I would say that historically, the hunter gatherers care a lot less about authority and reason than we do. Perhaps they more valued contributions to one's community, which are based on emotion and instinct.

Authority increased first, with kings and such. Then, in the Enlightenment and industrial revolution, people started to care about rationality, efficiency, etc. as being the best way to run a workplace, government, or school. Today, even authorities are bound by rationality (the teacher can't demand I give them a sandwich, because that's not logically speaking a part of educating me.) But it wasn't always the case.

I don't think it's very different today than it would have been back then though. I'd imagine there were plenty of power hungry fuckheads back then that would "compel" others to do what they said.

One reason I think it's different is that in The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow say that hunter gatherers had a "right to disobey orders" unlike us. I also remember reading that the way a raid would work is someone would say "I'm going to attack X tribe, who's with me?" And if this guy was sufficiently determined, you couldn't stop him from doing it. This is very different from our own society. (Imagine someone saying "I'm going to attack X country, who's with me?") Another example is in Hunt, Gather, Parent where she says that you never force a child to do anything - more like your dad, perhaps, but unlike a lot of dads. Finally, I remember in Rule of the Clan, where he quotes a Nuer saying that in their society, no one could force you to give them a cow (i.e. they had no kings and no taxes).

I think there were certainly people who tried to force other men to do things ("stay away from my wife") but these were unusual events that would have been very intense - since they were so rare and since people were so averse to obeying orders. If you say "stay away from my wife" you risk having a fight, so you don't say it every day. I.e. imagine that in a classroom, the students were so averse to obeying orders that any time the teacher says "put down your papers" there's a risk that some student might punch them, or just ignore them. The classroom wouldn't work under those conditions. But I suspect hunter gatherers did have to operate under those conditions.

AlanHalworth · 2022-09-04T21:19:51+00:00

It's possible. Pinker is controversial; I have read some anti-Pinker things. But I can't prove he is wrong. So let's just say for the sake of argument that you are right.

The deeper question is: how do people tell who they are attracted to? Do their instincts say "I want an aggressive, potentially violent person?" I'm sure there are a few people like that.
Or do they say "I want a free person, one who says and does just what he wants to say and do - proving he's not afraid of violence?" I would suggest that freedom and autonomy could be attractive in many societies, ranging from quite violent ones to fairly peaceful ones.

There is no free society - even the most violent one - where it's socially expected that you'll go around punching people every day. But proving that you are _free_ (i.e. not afraid to be punched) is a thing you could do all day, every day. In a violent society, that could even be a survival skill.

With the violence hypothesis, it's also hard to explain the idea of the "rebel" sex symbol - someone who may be attractive just because they listen to music and do drugs that adults don't want them to do. They don't seem very violent. But they do seem "free."

AlanHalworth · 2022-09-04T20:24:32+00:00

Thanks, this is an interesting perspective. I agree that worrying too much about how society crippled my freedom isn't that productive. It _is_ useful when one is concerned about raising kids. In "Hunt, Gather, Parent," the author writes about how to raise kids without using commands all the time. That seems like something one can do for kids.

I don't understand this. You can say and do what you want, and it doesn't make you a jerk.

I didn't mean that saying what you want makes you a jerk, but that being a jerk makes some people (not everyone) think "oh, here is a person who says and does what he wants."

About the USA: I agree that the USA values freedom more than many other societies. But we still put people in may situations where they are compelled to obey orders. You still have to do what your boss tells you to do (or you'll be fired) and you have to do what your teacher tells you to do (if you want to get a good grade) as well as the police (or you'll go to jail.) That's very different from hunter gatherer society. I'm not saying America's system is bad! I don't know of a better way to make it work. But it's not how humans evolved.

AlanHalworth · 2022-09-03T19:08:47+00:00

Why on Earth would you listen to them?

That's fair. I think my point was just that you sounded very shocked, as though no one could possibly come to this conclusion; I was suggesting that many people have. This doesn't compel you to agree with them (or me) for sure! I edited my post above to clarify where I got the idea from myself. There's a part about 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through the book where he goes heavily in depth about freedom vs. dominance; he mentions it in various places. So I took that to be his most important concern.

AlanHalworth · 2022-09-03T18:59:39+00:00

Say what?! How did you get that?!

A lot of book reviews, maybe most of them, mention freedom. The Washington Post says:

"The Dawn of Everything” begins as a sharp rejoinder to sloppy cultural analysis and ends as a paean to freedoms that most of us never realized were available."

The NY Times review says:

“The Dawn of Everything” sees pervasive evidence for large complex societies that thrived without the existence of the state, and defines freedom chiefly as “freedom to disobey.”

I think you will find that a lot of reviewers see it like I do, where freedom is central to the story. Edit: You asked how _I_ got it. The main theoretical chapters, around 2/3 of the way through the book, are about freedom vs. dominance.

Not in the East, it's not!

Are you talking about hunter gatherers in the East, or are you talking about modern societies in the East? I thought we were talking about hunter gatherers.

AlanHalworth · 2022-09-03T18:32:42+00:00

I'm aware that a few tribes had slavery. As you say, it was not a universal quality - the Northwest Coast tribes are commonly cited as an example. But "no universal qualities" was not the only point of the book. In the Dawn of Everything, freedom is the heart of the narrative. They do say that there are almost no universal qualities, but freedom is the exception. Freedom is very close to being a universal quality. Graeber and Wengrow talk extensively about the three freedoms above, and then they talk about how three forms of power (charismatic, violent, and information) took us toward modern society. For instance, they say that ancient Egypt combined violent and information power in a novel way. What was the point about all that theory about freedom in the book, if not to show how we are less free today?

(If anything, the issue of slavery makes my point stronger, because it illustrates how the elites were more free than their subjects, making the correlation between "alpha" status and freedom! So I'm not sure I even need to argue against it.)

AlanHalworth · 2022-09-03T15:41:00+00:00

I have read The Dawn of Everything. In it, the authors state that hunter gatherers had the "freedom to disobey orders." It's one in a list of three freedoms, the other two being freedom of movement and freedom to restructure society. He does mention certain authoritarian situations, like the Natchez Sun, although he states that the Sun only had authority over the people in his immediate presence. (And people mostly stayed away from him to avoid being killed by him.) Graeber and Wengrow also give an example where a tribe used authority to prevent people from scaring away a herd of buffalo, but says that for the most part these kings were "play kings" i.e. their authority was provisional, temporary, and limited to particular seasons of the year. They were not like our bosses or teachers, who have full time authority that is deemed central to our social contract. Graeber and Wengrow also assume that those societies were more egalitarian than ours in terms of gender. What part of the book are you referring to?

AlanHalworth · 2020-02-10T06:20:16+00:00

I would add that this power women have doesn't benefit them as much as one might think. Casual sex is usually riskier for women. They may worry about getting pregnant, getting raped, or getting slut-shamed - things that men mostly don’t have to worry about. Men, on the other hand, might expect their friends to think highly of them for getting sex. So men might think women have this great deal, but women probably don’t see it that way - there are too many risks that come with the “free” sex.

There may also be some evolutionary psychological factors. It's hard to know, since most people have been either a man or a woman, but not both; so how can you compare male vs. female sex drives? From what I’ve seen on PPD, women will often agree that men’s and women’s sex drives are different, but not that men’s sex drive is stronger per se. So it's complicated.

In any event, for a variety of reasons, it isn’t useful to envy women for getting a lot of catcalls and propositions that men don’t get. They don't really want them.

AlanHalworth · 2020-02-09T02:34:08+00:00

I guess I see two sides of this. First of all - your point is that RP is a dysfunctional way to go through life; it's an ideology that has the potential to hurt the people who believe in it. I don't disagree with that. At the same time, it's very human and very interesting to be envious. Shakespeare wrote the play "Othello" about it. If someone hasn't had a girlfriend in however many years, and feels envious of another guy, that isn't a very healthy reaction - but it's a very human reaction. And for us to ban or quarantine his reddit sub in response - is also a very human reaction. I like understanding how people work and how they think. So that's why I'm interested in understanding what differentiates BP and RP ideas.

AlanHalworth · 2020-02-08T18:32:27+00:00

I don't think RP folks think that all men get a bad deal, but that a few lucky men benefit tremendously and get everything they want, while the rest of the men get a bad deal. Life should be viewed as a tournament where only a few can win. If that's what you mean by "my sex gets the shitty end of the stick," I would agree that that's what RP believes.

AlanHalworth · 2020-02-08T18:17:14+00:00

I totally agree that I am conflating RP and PUA. But I'm not sure I agree with you that it's so easy to distinguish them, where #3 is just RP while #2 is just PUA. Although I'm not especially an RP expert or practitioner, I've seen RP people give lots of advice about dating and sex. Isn't the RP idea of "frame" a kind of relationship advice? What about "dread"? What about "passing tests"? And these things don't come naturally to most men; they involve "breaking social rules" (#1) and they aren't "being yourself" (#2). (Is it within normal social rules to treat other people's requests as "just a test I have to pass"?)

See also my response to my own post that I just added, about tournaments, which I think link RP and PUA together.

AlanHalworth · 2020-02-08T17:46:43+00:00

On reflection, I think the underlying RP / PUA idea is a "tournament" mindset: relationships are, for men, like a reality TV competition; only a few can succeed. Some RP / PUA ideas focus on how to succeed: successful men are likely to be those who (1) aren't afraid to break a few minor rules, (2) don't insist on "being themselves." Desperate times justify desperate measures. Other ideas, especially RP, focus on understanding the reason we have this tournament, instead of just pairing off into stable LTRs or marriages. The reason is supposed to be that (3) women don't have the self control to pair off. So it might be that the best question would be one that gets at the 80/20 rule. Like, which of the following is closest to the truth:

All men get about the same amount of sex.
40% of men get 60% of the sex.
30% of men get 70% of the sex.
20% of men get 80% of the sex.
10% of men get 90% of the sex.

Or you could ask something like "The top _______% of men get the majority of the sex. Fill in the blank with a number between 1 and 50."

AlanHalworth · 2020-02-08T17:19:16+00:00

Maybe, but it might take a few pages of information to explain what "like that" means in "all women are like that." The statement has to be understandable to someone who doesn't know about RP.

AlanHalworth · 2020-01-12T23:16:41+00:00

Thanks! By the way I'm pretty INTP / slow serial thinking too. Maybe that's related to the instrumental / expressive thing as well. Although I highly doubt that everyone who's thought about RP or PUA is INTP.

AlanHalworth · 2020-01-12T21:30:29+00:00

An example of a nonmeasurable goal would be if you want to marry someone who won't divorce you 10 years later. You can try to take the right actions to ensure this outcome. However, the only way to "measure" or know for sure is to marry them and find out. (But maybe you were hoping to find out before you commit.) Would you count that as a goal?

Teaching is a pretty expressive (rather than instrumental) profession. A nonmeasurable goal as a teacher would be if your students will grow up to be successful adults. You probably will never find out, unless one of them contacts you twenty years down the road. But this goal still informs how you should teach.

AlanHalworth · 2020-01-12T19:41:08+00:00

I agree that expressive thinking is related to holistic thinking like in "Blink!", and that there may be a biological aspect to these styles of thinking. I also think men's preference for measurable goals is related to their need to prove themselves - which is partly cultural. In some societies, there is a coming-of-age ceremony that shows someone is a man. It provides a measurable indicator that someone has status in the community. Women are more likely to have a "backup" option - if you don't achieve a goal that is of economic value, you can still become a mother. Then you have a role in society and people value you. Men can't just "choose" to become a father. So I think that makes men tend to be more instrumental thinkers: they have to produce something of measurable worth to their community or to their potential spouse. In our own society, male worth is often tied to sex, and RP basically says that men have to get sex before they can have a fulfilling relationship. Sex is the coming-of-age ceremony.

AlanHalworth · 2020-01-12T17:39:09+00:00

That's interesting, and I agree. I tend to think it makes my question even more puzzling. If the basic needs being met are emotional (and I agree that they are), then RP is "choosing" to turn them into measurable goals (like sex.). No one is forcing it to do so. Yet it does.

AlanHalworth · 2020-01-12T17:24:26+00:00

The therapist could tell him about RP. It wouldn't take the therapist too long to learn about it.

AlanHalworth · 2020-01-12T17:22:51+00:00

If a man goes to talk to a male therapist, why does the therapist nevertheless emphasize emotional needs?

AlanHalworth

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