<strong>The Non-Tragedy of the Non-Linear Commons</strong>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public goods are produced at all levels of the biological hierarchy, from the secretion of diffusible molecules by cells to social interactions in humans. However, the cooperation needed to produce public goods is vulnerable to exploitation by free-riders &mdash; the Tragedy of the Commons. The dominant solutions to this problem of collective action are that some form of positive assortment (due to kinship or spatial structure) or enforcement (reward and punishment) is necessary for public-goods cooperation to evolve and be maintained. However, these solutions are only needed when individual contributions to the public good accrue linearly, and the assumption of linearity is never true in biology. We explain how cooperation for nonlinear public goods is maintained endogenously and does not require positive-assortment or enforcement mechanisms, and we review the considerable empirical evidence for the existence and maintenance of nonlinear public goods in microbiology, cancer biology, and behavioral ecology. We argue that it is time to move beyond discussions about assortment and enforcement in the study of cooperation in biology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".