I’m not going to answer that, as you have access to the same tools for research that I do, and are welcome to post pointers to better evidence if you have them.
I will note that the way you framed this question is a wonderful example of what I refer to in the post as “self-esteem transactions” over text channels. Whether intentional or not, this comes across as a query crafted to lower the addressee’s self-esteem ever so slightly.
“What planet are you from?” is the same sort of line, a little blunter.
While dominance relationships have been widely studied in chimpanzees, in bonobos, dominance style and linearity of hierarchy are still under debate. In fact, some authors stated that bonobo hierarchy is nonlinear/ill-defined, while others claimed that it is fairly linear. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that a shift in group composition determines changes in linearity of hierarchy. To test this hypothesis, we collected data on one of the largest captive groups in the world, in the Apenheul Primate Park (The Netherlands). We investigated the linearity of the hierarchy in two different periods, with a shifting group composition. We used the corrected Landau’s index and David’s scores to estimate which animals were most dominant. The major overall result of our study is that hierarchy is fairly nonlinear in this group: during the first study period (eight adults), the hierarchy was nonlinear, whereas during the second one (six adults), it failed to reach statistical linearity. We argue that the reduction of the number of adults is the principal factor affecting linearity. We also found that dominance interactions were evenly distributed across sex classes in both study periods. Furthermore, no correlation was observed between age/body weight and rank. As for the overall dominance relationship between males and females, our results suggest that there is no exclusive female dominance in the Apenheul group. The dominance style of bonobos may be loose and differentially expressed in diverse groups or in the same group, along with shifting conditions.
In addition to the bolded, this suggests that dominance theory is a useful lens even for studying Bonobos; even if Bonobo hierarchies aren’t linear, they’re still hierarchies.
As Frans de Waal has explored in various books, especially his Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (with Frans Lanting), bonobos have a mostly female hierarchy, but there is also a male hierarchy. It’s just that the male hierarchy is about being attractive to the females. Since mating is not controlled by either sex, fitness here is determined by how well the individual is accepted by the entire troop, unlike with gorillas or the common chimp, where male control is the norm.*
This is just from googling “Bonobo female hierarchy”. So it does seem reasonable for Doug to ask for a cite.
My source is this article, the very first Google hit for “bonobo dominance hierarchy”, which (apparently citing de Waal), states bluntly “There is no true dominance hierarchy for females; rather they are called ‘influential’ females.”
it does seem reasonable for Doug to ask for a cite.
Do note how you obtain better results if you know to ask nicely.
My main point is that the Bonobo social organization puts, to say the least, a very different set of connotations on the term “alpha” than it carries in everyday discourse or in PUA lore, and that we should look with at least some caution at our theories of dominance as applied to the human animal.
Do note how you obtain better results if you know to ask nicely.
I think “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” should be a rationalism quote.
My main point is that the Bonobo social organization puts, to say the least, a very different set of connotations on the term “alpha” than it carries in everyday discourse or in PUA lore, and that we should look with at least some caution at our theories of dominance as applied to the human animal.
Taking facts about primate dominance hierarchies and just assuming they map onto humans is certainly epistemologically irresponsible. But given that dominance hierarchies appear, in one form or another, throughout the rest of the primate kingdom, I would be quite surprised if there weren’t similar features in human social organization. Pick up artist literature, the successes of the movement aside, is certainly not a serious scientific attempt to assert a theory of dominance hierarchies in humans. But since dominance hierarchies play an incredibly significant role in mate selection among primates, one way to detect dominance hierarchies among humans, I think, is to pay attention to who has their pick of the opposite sex. So I find it highly plausible that who PUA/every day discourse would refer to as “alpha” is approximately who a socio-biological analysis of human groups would refer to as “alpha”.
One of the reasons the dominance theory perspective on status appeals to people here, I suspect, is that it happens to do a pretty good job reflecting how status plays out in our lives. There is a reason “alpha” talk was adopted in the first place. Traits that are like the behavior of bottom of the hierarchy primates indicates low status in humans (small size, passivity, few if any mating prospects) and traits that are like that of top of the hierarchy primates indicates high status (size, aggression, mates the most). All else being equal, that is. Obviously this is all complicated in humans by wealth, governments, class, culture etc. But it makes a lot of sense to look to dominance hierarchies as the evolutionary source of human status. We can test this hypothesis: What I listed above as the traits associated with the different ends of status hierarchies in primates is all I know and mostly based on recollection and common knowledge. Assuming there are primatologist accounts of additional behaviors associated with the different ends of the dominance hierarchies we can check to see if they correspond to our notion of status.
Most people employing heuristics and strategies for becoming better-liked or more-influential (PUA included) ultimately get their views from observation of human behavior (or some guru-regurgitated version thereof). That they sometimes make wooly arguments by analogy to some story about a pack of wolves, or paleolithic man, is indeed shameful, but I’m sure that they aren’t actually studying animals and then using those conclusions to guide their interactions with people.
Do note how you obtain better results if you know to ask nicely.
Where do you get these beliefs?
That did not seem particularly impolite to me. Isn’t it ordinary to expect a rationalist to have some idea where their beliefs come from, especially for empirical generalizations?
I didn’t say it was impolite. I do assert that it was a putdown. You can try a few variants:
“What is your source for this assertion?”—more formal, clear and exact.
“Where do you get this”—the brisker, more informal version, still acceptable.
The chosen phrasing conveys incredulity and a subtext that I’m making things up: the connotationally active term is “belief” instead of “information”—the latter would convey a presumption that I’m in fact well informed, and would be a more charitable interpretation.
There is an additional charge of contempt carried by the word “these” instead of “that”, since the quoted passage about which the question was asked contained a single assertion of fact. The image that comes up is a hand waved at the context of the quoted passage, as if the latter was just one particularly outrageous example picked among others.
“These beliefs strike me as odd” would be a more respectful phrasing; the presumption of imaginings vs information is still there, but the locutor at least owns up to that presumption: “strikes me” is a useful phrase for doing that.
With “where do you get” added to the mix, you have a triple whammy. The “you” form generally puts the interlocutor on the defensive, it easily comes off as an accusation.
So “where do you get these beliefs” carries the following connotations:
you are making shit up
the above is just one example, I had to start somewhere
you should know better than to try that on me
The tone is technically polite, but that only adds to the insult. There are usually many, many ways to choose how to say any given thing, so the particular way you pick is never innocent.
Whoever masters the skill of the artful putdown wields great power indeed...
...especially if they also know the next ploy: to accuse the offended party of “reading too much” into an “innocent” remark, meant “in good humor”. That one is a mainstay of the verbal bully.
Thanks for the thorough reply! I’m often in the position of making comments like “where do you get these beliefs” (at least, judging by the responses I get) and (honestly) responding that the offended party was reading too much into an innocent remark meant in good humor. I usually try to dissect the thing after to figure out what went wrong.
It didn’t occur to me that ‘belief’ might have weird connotations since I usually mean it in the purely epistemic sense; a different phrasing might be ‘putative knowledge’ which sounds much less nice to me. It seems someone dubious about your assertion’s value might even have to call it ‘putative information’ rather than ‘information’, so I’m not sure that helps much.
Also, ‘you’ didn’t strike me as odd since it was directed at you, and the question certainly wasn’t about where some other person got their beliefs. That said, my wife complains about my use of pronouns like that regularly. For example, I might say “your car”, “my car”, or “our car” interchangeably with no particular intent since they unambiguously refer to the same car, but she will read something into particularly “your car” so I’ve been on my guard about the pronoun “you” lately. On even more of a tangent, I wonder if this relates to uncomfortableness about the various pronouns for ‘you’ in Japanese language.
Did you study how to unpack these things, or is this one of those things that goes with being neurotypical?
Reminds me of the constant teasing my wife and I trade about “your kids” and “my kids”. Denotationally the same, but the connotations of the possessive are quite strong.
Study—no, at least no more than you could say I’ve studied language in general and how we do things with words. Maybe more sensitive to “these things” than is typical.
It didn’t occur to me that ‘belief’ might have weird connotations since I usually mean it in the purely epistemic sense; a different phrasing might be ‘putative knowledge’ which sounds much less nice to me. It seems someone dubious about your assertion’s value might even have to call it ‘putative information’ rather than ‘information’, so I’m not sure that helps much.
One of my mentors once suggested “So, what led you to that conclusion?” as a relatively neutral way to probe the origin of a belief, without connoting disbelief or disagreement.
I will note that the way you framed this question is a wonderful example of what I refer to in the post as “self-esteem transactions” over text channels.
I will note that as Douglas’s question carried a status transaction it gave you an excuse to reply with your own far more powerful status message, which in many cases leaves even important questions unanswered. (I myself prefer to ignore all “Where is your evidence!” demands when I think the question is mostly social rhetoric.)
Fortunately Jack ignored both transactions and gave a well thought out position on the topic in this instance. I was quite uncomfortable myself with the conclusion that Bonobo social behaviours were being used to support but I think Jack gave a far more complete response that I would have.
Kidding aside, don’t you think the very fact that we are using purely linguistic interactions as a medium for those transactions is evidence that they may have little to do with our primate inheritance?
Kidding aside, don’t you think the very fact that we are using purely linguistic interactions as a medium for those transactions is evidence that they may have little to do with our primate inheritance?
There is a large variation in the types of signals used for status tractions among primates, from violence and sex through to posture and vocalisations. By going linguistic with we have merely spiralled our primate status transactions off towards an extreme.
I’m not going to answer that, as you have access to the same tools for research that I do, and are welcome to post pointers to better evidence if you have them.
I will note that the way you framed this question is a wonderful example of what I refer to in the post as “self-esteem transactions” over text channels. Whether intentional or not, this comes across as a query crafted to lower the addressee’s self-esteem ever so slightly.
“What planet are you from?” is the same sort of line, a little blunter.
I have no comment on the status issues in this exchange but I am a little confused about the question of dominance hierarchy among Bonobo females.
Wikipedia says
This article HughRistik linked me to refers to an Alpha female.
Here is an abstract on the issue.
In addition to the bolded, this suggests that dominance theory is a useful lens even for studying Bonobos; even if Bonobo hierarchies aren’t linear, they’re still hierarchies.
And then this
This is just from googling “Bonobo female hierarchy”. So it does seem reasonable for Doug to ask for a cite.
My source is this article, the very first Google hit for “bonobo dominance hierarchy”, which (apparently citing de Waal), states bluntly “There is no true dominance hierarchy for females; rather they are called ‘influential’ females.”
Do note how you obtain better results if you know to ask nicely.
My main point is that the Bonobo social organization puts, to say the least, a very different set of connotations on the term “alpha” than it carries in everyday discourse or in PUA lore, and that we should look with at least some caution at our theories of dominance as applied to the human animal.
I think “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” should be a rationalism quote.
Taking facts about primate dominance hierarchies and just assuming they map onto humans is certainly epistemologically irresponsible. But given that dominance hierarchies appear, in one form or another, throughout the rest of the primate kingdom, I would be quite surprised if there weren’t similar features in human social organization. Pick up artist literature, the successes of the movement aside, is certainly not a serious scientific attempt to assert a theory of dominance hierarchies in humans. But since dominance hierarchies play an incredibly significant role in mate selection among primates, one way to detect dominance hierarchies among humans, I think, is to pay attention to who has their pick of the opposite sex. So I find it highly plausible that who PUA/every day discourse would refer to as “alpha” is approximately who a socio-biological analysis of human groups would refer to as “alpha”.
One of the reasons the dominance theory perspective on status appeals to people here, I suspect, is that it happens to do a pretty good job reflecting how status plays out in our lives. There is a reason “alpha” talk was adopted in the first place. Traits that are like the behavior of bottom of the hierarchy primates indicates low status in humans (small size, passivity, few if any mating prospects) and traits that are like that of top of the hierarchy primates indicates high status (size, aggression, mates the most). All else being equal, that is. Obviously this is all complicated in humans by wealth, governments, class, culture etc. But it makes a lot of sense to look to dominance hierarchies as the evolutionary source of human status. We can test this hypothesis: What I listed above as the traits associated with the different ends of status hierarchies in primates is all I know and mostly based on recollection and common knowledge. Assuming there are primatologist accounts of additional behaviors associated with the different ends of the dominance hierarchies we can check to see if they correspond to our notion of status.
Most people employing heuristics and strategies for becoming better-liked or more-influential (PUA included) ultimately get their views from observation of human behavior (or some guru-regurgitated version thereof). That they sometimes make wooly arguments by analogy to some story about a pack of wolves, or paleolithic man, is indeed shameful, but I’m sure that they aren’t actually studying animals and then using those conclusions to guide their interactions with people.
That did not seem particularly impolite to me. Isn’t it ordinary to expect a rationalist to have some idea where their beliefs come from, especially for empirical generalizations?
I didn’t say it was impolite. I do assert that it was a putdown. You can try a few variants:
“What is your source for this assertion?”—more formal, clear and exact. “Where do you get this”—the brisker, more informal version, still acceptable.
The chosen phrasing conveys incredulity and a subtext that I’m making things up: the connotationally active term is “belief” instead of “information”—the latter would convey a presumption that I’m in fact well informed, and would be a more charitable interpretation.
There is an additional charge of contempt carried by the word “these” instead of “that”, since the quoted passage about which the question was asked contained a single assertion of fact. The image that comes up is a hand waved at the context of the quoted passage, as if the latter was just one particularly outrageous example picked among others.
“These beliefs strike me as odd” would be a more respectful phrasing; the presumption of imaginings vs information is still there, but the locutor at least owns up to that presumption: “strikes me” is a useful phrase for doing that.
With “where do you get” added to the mix, you have a triple whammy. The “you” form generally puts the interlocutor on the defensive, it easily comes off as an accusation.
So “where do you get these beliefs” carries the following connotations:
you are making shit up
the above is just one example, I had to start somewhere
you should know better than to try that on me
The tone is technically polite, but that only adds to the insult. There are usually many, many ways to choose how to say any given thing, so the particular way you pick is never innocent.
Whoever masters the skill of the artful putdown wields great power indeed...
...especially if they also know the next ploy: to accuse the offended party of “reading too much” into an “innocent” remark, meant “in good humor”. That one is a mainstay of the verbal bully.
Thanks for the thorough reply! I’m often in the position of making comments like “where do you get these beliefs” (at least, judging by the responses I get) and (honestly) responding that the offended party was reading too much into an innocent remark meant in good humor. I usually try to dissect the thing after to figure out what went wrong.
It didn’t occur to me that ‘belief’ might have weird connotations since I usually mean it in the purely epistemic sense; a different phrasing might be ‘putative knowledge’ which sounds much less nice to me. It seems someone dubious about your assertion’s value might even have to call it ‘putative information’ rather than ‘information’, so I’m not sure that helps much.
Also, ‘you’ didn’t strike me as odd since it was directed at you, and the question certainly wasn’t about where some other person got their beliefs. That said, my wife complains about my use of pronouns like that regularly. For example, I might say “your car”, “my car”, or “our car” interchangeably with no particular intent since they unambiguously refer to the same car, but she will read something into particularly “your car” so I’ve been on my guard about the pronoun “you” lately. On even more of a tangent, I wonder if this relates to uncomfortableness about the various pronouns for ‘you’ in Japanese language.
Did you study how to unpack these things, or is this one of those things that goes with being neurotypical?
Reminds me of the constant teasing my wife and I trade about “your kids” and “my kids”. Denotationally the same, but the connotations of the possessive are quite strong.
Study—no, at least no more than you could say I’ve studied language in general and how we do things with words. Maybe more sensitive to “these things” than is typical.
One of my mentors once suggested “So, what led you to that conclusion?” as a relatively neutral way to probe the origin of a belief, without connoting disbelief or disagreement.
[citation needed]
I will note that as Douglas’s question carried a status transaction it gave you an excuse to reply with your own far more powerful status message, which in many cases leaves even important questions unanswered. (I myself prefer to ignore all “Where is your evidence!” demands when I think the question is mostly social rhetoric.)
Fortunately Jack ignored both transactions and gave a well thought out position on the topic in this instance. I was quite uncomfortable myself with the conclusion that Bonobo social behaviours were being used to support but I think Jack gave a far more complete response that I would have.
Your post also contains a pretty nice status transaction.
God I love recursion.
Two. I’d like to think they were both positive sum.
Flattery will get you anywhere with me.
Kidding aside, don’t you think the very fact that we are using purely linguistic interactions as a medium for those transactions is evidence that they may have little to do with our primate inheritance?
There is a large variation in the types of signals used for status tractions among primates, from violence and sex through to posture and vocalisations. By going linguistic with we have merely spiralled our primate status transactions off towards an extreme.
You’ll show him yours if he’ll show you his?