I honestly always associated 'beta' for that socially super awkward people. Considering how human society works multi social layered, a leader in one setting easily becomes a follower in another etc...He was a bit wimpy with Josy though, second guessing whether he should kiss her after he dropped her home from work (that would have been weird), and then chastising himself for supposedly missing his opportunity. He went from that, to casually walking in on three naked girls in a spa and whipping his cock out.
I guess that humiliating situation with the raid on the HOTs that left him running around naked on campus may have awoken the DIK in him.
An alpha is a leader, someone who draws people to them, who easily commands respect, someone who projects a lot of confidence. Not all girls go for that bravado, but it is attractive.
A beta is someone who is more of a follower, works behind the scenes, shy when put on the spot in front of others. Of course these often get interpreted as polar opposites, but betas are typical, regular nice guys.
Then there are totally socially awkward people. I don't know what the name for them is. Geeks?
And typical regular guys ( or gals) for me usually don't get an identifier due to that reason. They may easily be in a different hierarchy.
hell, what would you call Magnar in this skewed naming system? Arguably, he is the one guy in this whole story that has shit together the most. Leads a certain social group, but interacts with others outside the group in an equilateral fashion. I don't know, this might be probably because modern pop culture tainted those epithets with addendums like "cuck" to betas, (in itself a misnomer), or "male" to alpha etc.
This is all made worse by the fact that tri alpha and tri beta are names of frats in this story too. It's all very unnecessarily confusing. I stick to nerds, jocks, and DIKs, easy enough identifiers.