Primate authority comes from (at least) two methods or paths, dominance and prestige.  I guess if you want a bad one line summary, dominance is management or in its more extreme form its like an overseer with a whip vs prestige is leadership or in its more extreme form its like hero worship.  Because of long term memory for revenge purposes, and easy to use lethal weapons have been invented, prestige is way more important for humans than most any other animal, although some animals do use prestige signalling, just none quite as much as people.  The animal world is mostly dominance ordered.<p>Anyway, grand op is claiming prestige signaling isn&#x27;t going to provide results (which is incredibly unlikely in a human pack; maybe a wolf pack, sure, or if the human participants are doin it wrong or are crazy, sure) and you&#x27;re claiming prestige signalling usually leads to prestige results, so op is wrong and you&#x27;re right but it doesn&#x27;t matter because you&#x27;re talking past each other on separate topics.  Ironically it doesn&#x27;t matter because as you correctly point out, dominance and prestige results are more or less the same most of the time.<p>The hundred year old manual is talking something totally different from both of you, that there&#x27;s a moral or ethical need for both results to be exactly identical or else things are going to get unpleasant because prestige means are generally way more pleasant than dominance means.  She can either play along with her side of the prestige strategy or unfortunately the dominance strategy will inevitably end up getting played and that&#x27;s no fun.<p>Assuming its your responsibility to water the horses, you properly lead a horse to water and it refuses to drink, that&#x27;s just not going to be fun for anyone involved, it really is the horses job or duty to drink after its been properly led.  Note its not just leadership, its leadership with the positive adjectives applied; no fair weaseling out on the obedience obligation due to poor leadership excuses if by the very definition of the claim it only follows from good leadership.<p>Good luck defining good leadership.<p>There&#x27;s also some civilization wide social contract philosophy about good leadership inherently being owed obedience by the nature of the leadership being good, and no other justification is necessary assuming the leadership is good, blah blah blah, all kind of in opposition to the concept of the divine right of kings and hereditary monarchy.  To some extent this is the moral justification of democracy, you have to obey the good leader you selected, assuming its not all a sham like modern elections, etc.  And this is just applying that large scale societal stuff to a tiny family, for better or worse.  This makes it a scaling problem and HN loves scaling problems.