On the mathematics of survival may I suggest the classic
Laws of the Game : How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance
'Using game theory and examples of actual games people play, Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler show how the elements of chance and rules underlie all that happens in the universe, from genetic behavior through economic growth to the composition of music.'
It is eloquent and elegant and will elevate your learning on 'how we do things together'.
Thanks Harry for the super pointer to Laws of the Game!
.... it’s a beautiful fit with this discussion on “how we do things together.”
The “replicator dynamics” math they use tracks how these tendencies spread in a population depending on which strategy seems to be paying off better.
Change the conditions (like raising the cost of enforcement, or improving trust systems, or strengthening pool limits), and you move the tipping point. That makes cooperation “make sense” for more people, faster.
From their texts:
“The dice and the rules of the game—these are our symbols for chance and natural law.”
“The ‘cooperative’ effect that neighboring beads have leads to the formation of patterns.”
Those two lines from Eigen & Winkler capture our translation exactly: payoffs (the “rules”) and contingencies (the “dice”) shape which patterns stabilize ... from coercion to pooling.
It is a good to try and map Eigen’s “homeostasis” onto the quadrant chart
Think of “homeostasis” as the stable zones (attractors) where the system tends to settle.
Quadrant A — Classic Coercion (Control high, Extraction high):
Homeostasis = coercive equilibrium. Enforcement is cheap, extraction is lucrative, so the coercion strategy has higher payoff and reproduces itself (temporarily stable attractor).
Quadrant B — Fragile Tyranny (Control high, Extraction costly):
Homeostasis = unstable equilibrium. Control is expensive; small shocks (sanctions, organizing) can tip the system out of coercion because payoffs no longer justify enforcement.
Quadrant C — Unanchored Commons (Trust low, Shared prosperity intended):
Homeostasis = noisy drift (weak or absent attractor). Without verification/limits, breach risk stays high; cooperation doesn’t reliably pay, so patterns don’t hold.
Homeostasis = cooperative equilibrium. Kept promises and anti-capture limits make pooling the higher-payoff strategy; the cooperative pattern is self-reinforcing (stable longer term attractor).
In Eigen’s spirit: when the payoff landscape favors coercion, the system’s “thermostat” settles in coercive homeostasis; when we re-shape payoffs (raise enforcement costs, reduce breach risk, enforce issuance caps), the thermostat clicks into a cooperative homeostasis—precisely the Pooling Formula zone.
What Eigen and Winkler really offer us is a way of thinking of societies as statistical simulations already running. The mathematics of replicator dynamics isn’t an abstract model we impose; it’s a description of the actual “game” being played every day by real people under real payoffs. When we alter enforcement costs, improve trust systems, or cap issuance, we’re not just making moral gestures - we’re changing the parameters of the simulation.
That’s why protocols like commitment pooling matters (because can reveal what is going on already). Each small pool is a live experiment: it lets us watch how promises, breaches, and limits interact, and whether cooperation becomes the rational default. Federated pools become a larger simulation - a kind of “social laboratory” - where we can see which designs hold homeostasis and which collapse.
In other words, we’re not only advocating for a different ethic; we’re iterating a different game (by seeing the inner protocols).
... just as Eigen’s beads self-organize into patterns under new rules, communities can self-organize into regenerative patterns when we clearly see the payoffs favor kept promises over extraction.
This is the quiet power of commitment pooling: a way to prototype new (and very old) equilibria, grounded in mathematics but lived through people.
As to the problem: There are lots of cases where, as you describe, coercion is used to control and extract. But many of our problems today are people *voluntarily* allowing extraction. Indeed they are asking for it: White men with no college degree are the power base for Trump; he also has Black men and Latine voters of both genders voting Republican in record numbers. That is not just the US: working class support for right-wing domination is a global phenomenon. Those who could benefit most from labor unions and health care and education support and sustainability are actively supporting the folks who take that away.
Committment pool networks offer a solution to that problem as well, but systems for minimizing misinformation and encouraging critical thinking that emerge from the bottom-up pose challenges of their own. A couple of examples of what we might term "grassroots epistemology" here:
You’re right—today’s crisis is not only about top-down coercion. Many people willingly align with extractive powers, often because domination offers them identity, belonging, or the illusion of safety. Like ants raised in captivity, they are conditioned to follow, even when it harms their own flourishing. This is the fragile tyranny we inhabit: enforcement is costly, but voluntary consent keeps it propped up.
Commitment pooling speaks to this by cultivating what you’ve called “grassroots epistemology.” Instead of centralized stories that manufacture consent, pools build relational memory: people can see who fulfilled promises, who showed care, and how value really flowed. That lived record makes it harder for misinformation to erase trust, because memory is not abstract—it’s embodied in neighbors, meals, and care hours delivered.
Yes, this is a challenge. A pool cannot on its own counter the machinery of propaganda. But it can nurture small fields where coherence, reciprocity, and care are visible and trackable. Over time, these fields federate like mycelium, offering another logic: not “who do we follow?” but “who do we trust because they fulfilled their promise?”
We need humility here. People will continue to be seduced by domination narratives, just as ecosystems can be captured by parasites. But the path of commitment pooling is to steadily route trust back into communities—so that shared prosperity becomes not just moral but rational, felt, and remembered.
"Instead of centralized stories that manufacture consent, pools build relational memory" --yes, those are great *examples* of grassroots epistemology. But you cannot create all of grassroots epistemology from that. Relational epistemology is also a description of how stories like "vaccines cause autism" are created: anectdotal stories shared because of mutual trust. The scientific method can also be part of grassroots epistemology; it too can be fostered by committment pools. But not by intuition and anectdote.
To be more specific: we did a case study where our high school students tested cosmetics for pH levels, identified the ones causing hair damage, and then made posters for alternatives, based on organic, neutral pH ingredients (https://csdt.org/culture/phempowered/teaching-outcomes.html). But I noticed the posters had bogus, pseudo-scientific claims like "detoxifies your body". I began to realize that *taking away the scientific method from Black communities was part of exploitation and extraction*.
You could think of this as recovering epistemic commitment pools from African American history, just as you are describing the recovery of economic commitment pools from Indigenous history.
You’re right: relational memory in one pool is not the whole of grassroots epistemology. A single pool is like a synapse - it can surface fulfilled promises, but it cannot, by itself, reliably/fully test competing claims or correct false intuitions. As you note, stories of trust can generate both deep wisdom and dangerous pseudoscience.
This is where I see the analogy to a brain of pools ... each pool is a limited node of coherence, but when federated (linked through trust, diversity of commitments, and feedback) they begin to approximate the conditions for deeper inquiry. Hypotheses (like value propositions) can circulate, be tested across contexts, and corrected when patterns emerge. A lone pool can hold “detox” claims. A network of pools, each comparing outcomes, makes it easier to see what regenerates and what corrodes.
So here the scientific method is not foreign ... it’s like relational discipline. Controlled experiments, data sharing, peer review: all of these can be seen as protocolized forms of pooling commitments. Agents promise to test carefully, to document results, to expose claims to others’ scrutiny. If those commitments are made visible in the pool, the network can reinforce scientific rigor just as it does reciprocity (and value adjustment) in economics.
Du Bois’ data visualizations, medical abolitionist networks ... great stuff (focusing on context). They look exactly like what we’d call epistemic commitment pools: collective promises to test, record, and share knowledge for the sake of liberation.
The tragedy, as you point out, is that stripping Black communities of access to scientific method (and relational memory in general) was itself a form of extraction. Recovering that is inseparable from recovering economic pools: both are about restoring the means of regeneration, one for knowledge, one for livelihood (those two really shouldn't be separated).
So yes - I’d phrase it like this ... Pooling is not only economic (in the financial sense). It is epistemic ... (economic management of the home). And just as ecological or social pools federate into a commons that resists capture, epistemic pools federate into a living brain where stories are tested, knowledge evolves, and trust is both emotional and empirical.
This feels to me like the next frontier: weaving epistemic and economic pooling together, so the same mycelial network routes care, livelihoods, and truth-testing.
I would love to explore how epistemic pooling and economic pooling can weave together in practice. To assess/reassess claims and discern a helpful, regenerative practice from what is here called “psuedoscience”—how can this be done w kindness, empathy and care? And how can it be tracked? It seems that the value for inquiry & uncertainty must be celebrated & woven into the texture of the agreements…
Also, how can economic pooling include the implicate of these epistemic principles?
Those are all the right questions, not sure I have a lot of answers. One challenge that I think you are (rightly!) hinting at is that at the grassroots, you have belief in "alternative" treatments that entangle really good insights with "new age" marketing and commodification. Herbal treatments for example really can be effective--not only cheaper and safer, but also nicely tied to economic pooling with those harvesting from the wild or growing in local farms. But they have been commodified by exploitative companies that make false marketing claims. At the same time, "big pharma" has its own pseudoscience: for example the claim that we must forbid sale of low-cost generic meds because of quality concerns.
So grassroots knoweldge has two opponents: large corporations that dominate the market, and explotative "alternative medicine" corporations that make false claims.
One approach to help folks at the grassroots "disentangle" the two sources of misinformation from authentic knoweldge is using what is called "citizen science". There are some great examples here: https://www.csresources.org/our-history
This is so beautifully written - it reads to me as if it distils years if not decades of both thinking and practice (tacit and consciously formal) into crystal clear language that reads like instant common sense (why did I never put it this way before and why are we not all following this?). Thank you for sharing this!
On the mathematics of survival may I suggest the classic
Laws of the Game : How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance
'Using game theory and examples of actual games people play, Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler show how the elements of chance and rules underlie all that happens in the universe, from genetic behavior through economic growth to the composition of music.'
It is eloquent and elegant and will elevate your learning on 'how we do things together'.
It is al about balancing homeostasis.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2318793.Laws_of_the_Game_
Thanks Harry for the super pointer to Laws of the Game!
.... it’s a beautiful fit with this discussion on “how we do things together.”
The “replicator dynamics” math they use tracks how these tendencies spread in a population depending on which strategy seems to be paying off better.
Change the conditions (like raising the cost of enforcement, or improving trust systems, or strengthening pool limits), and you move the tipping point. That makes cooperation “make sense” for more people, faster.
From their texts:
“The dice and the rules of the game—these are our symbols for chance and natural law.”
“The ‘cooperative’ effect that neighboring beads have leads to the formation of patterns.”
Those two lines from Eigen & Winkler capture our translation exactly: payoffs (the “rules”) and contingencies (the “dice”) shape which patterns stabilize ... from coercion to pooling.
It is a good to try and map Eigen’s “homeostasis” onto the quadrant chart
Think of “homeostasis” as the stable zones (attractors) where the system tends to settle.
Quadrant A — Classic Coercion (Control high, Extraction high):
Homeostasis = coercive equilibrium. Enforcement is cheap, extraction is lucrative, so the coercion strategy has higher payoff and reproduces itself (temporarily stable attractor).
Quadrant B — Fragile Tyranny (Control high, Extraction costly):
Homeostasis = unstable equilibrium. Control is expensive; small shocks (sanctions, organizing) can tip the system out of coercion because payoffs no longer justify enforcement.
Quadrant C — Unanchored Commons (Trust low, Shared prosperity intended):
Homeostasis = noisy drift (weak or absent attractor). Without verification/limits, breach risk stays high; cooperation doesn’t reliably pay, so patterns don’t hold.
Quadrant D — Thriving Commons / Commitment Pools (Trust high, Shared prosperity high):
Homeostasis = cooperative equilibrium. Kept promises and anti-capture limits make pooling the higher-payoff strategy; the cooperative pattern is self-reinforcing (stable longer term attractor).
In Eigen’s spirit: when the payoff landscape favors coercion, the system’s “thermostat” settles in coercive homeostasis; when we re-shape payoffs (raise enforcement costs, reduce breach risk, enforce issuance caps), the thermostat clicks into a cooperative homeostasis—precisely the Pooling Formula zone.
What Eigen and Winkler really offer us is a way of thinking of societies as statistical simulations already running. The mathematics of replicator dynamics isn’t an abstract model we impose; it’s a description of the actual “game” being played every day by real people under real payoffs. When we alter enforcement costs, improve trust systems, or cap issuance, we’re not just making moral gestures - we’re changing the parameters of the simulation.
That’s why protocols like commitment pooling matters (because can reveal what is going on already). Each small pool is a live experiment: it lets us watch how promises, breaches, and limits interact, and whether cooperation becomes the rational default. Federated pools become a larger simulation - a kind of “social laboratory” - where we can see which designs hold homeostasis and which collapse.
In other words, we’re not only advocating for a different ethic; we’re iterating a different game (by seeing the inner protocols).
... just as Eigen’s beads self-organize into patterns under new rules, communities can self-organize into regenerative patterns when we clearly see the payoffs favor kept promises over extraction.
This is the quiet power of commitment pooling: a way to prototype new (and very old) equilibria, grounded in mathematics but lived through people.
I am very happy my suggestion landed so well. In fertile ground, so to speak. :-)
If you want to go deeper, like more to the abstract mathematical side, then this is also interesting:
https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/
You might know this already.
More to say on the very content of your (very literally) valuable work, but that has to wait until I have te brain space.
Thanks for your gifts.
Great analysis of the solution.
As to the problem: There are lots of cases where, as you describe, coercion is used to control and extract. But many of our problems today are people *voluntarily* allowing extraction. Indeed they are asking for it: White men with no college degree are the power base for Trump; he also has Black men and Latine voters of both genders voting Republican in record numbers. That is not just the US: working class support for right-wing domination is a global phenomenon. Those who could benefit most from labor unions and health care and education support and sustainability are actively supporting the folks who take that away.
Committment pool networks offer a solution to that problem as well, but systems for minimizing misinformation and encouraging critical thinking that emerge from the bottom-up pose challenges of their own. A couple of examples of what we might term "grassroots epistemology" here:
https://csdt.org/culture/phempowered/entrepreneurship.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366292334_Anti-racism_for_Freethinkers_Cultivating_a_Mindset_for_Curiosity_and_Scientific_Inquiry_in_the_Context_of_Racial_Equity_and_Social_Justice
You’re right—today’s crisis is not only about top-down coercion. Many people willingly align with extractive powers, often because domination offers them identity, belonging, or the illusion of safety. Like ants raised in captivity, they are conditioned to follow, even when it harms their own flourishing. This is the fragile tyranny we inhabit: enforcement is costly, but voluntary consent keeps it propped up.
Commitment pooling speaks to this by cultivating what you’ve called “grassroots epistemology.” Instead of centralized stories that manufacture consent, pools build relational memory: people can see who fulfilled promises, who showed care, and how value really flowed. That lived record makes it harder for misinformation to erase trust, because memory is not abstract—it’s embodied in neighbors, meals, and care hours delivered.
Yes, this is a challenge. A pool cannot on its own counter the machinery of propaganda. But it can nurture small fields where coherence, reciprocity, and care are visible and trackable. Over time, these fields federate like mycelium, offering another logic: not “who do we follow?” but “who do we trust because they fulfilled their promise?”
We need humility here. People will continue to be seduced by domination narratives, just as ecosystems can be captured by parasites. But the path of commitment pooling is to steadily route trust back into communities—so that shared prosperity becomes not just moral but rational, felt, and remembered.
"Instead of centralized stories that manufacture consent, pools build relational memory" --yes, those are great *examples* of grassroots epistemology. But you cannot create all of grassroots epistemology from that. Relational epistemology is also a description of how stories like "vaccines cause autism" are created: anectdotal stories shared because of mutual trust. The scientific method can also be part of grassroots epistemology; it too can be fostered by committment pools. But not by intuition and anectdote.
To be more specific: we did a case study where our high school students tested cosmetics for pH levels, identified the ones causing hair damage, and then made posters for alternatives, based on organic, neutral pH ingredients (https://csdt.org/culture/phempowered/teaching-outcomes.html). But I noticed the posters had bogus, pseudo-scientific claims like "detoxifies your body". I began to realize that *taking away the scientific method from Black communities was part of exploitation and extraction*.
So we created this page (https://csdt.org/culture/phempowered/entrepreneurship.html) to link grassroots Black entrepreneurs using the scientific method, tips on how to identify pseudo-science langage in advertisements, etc.
We also did studies on how aspects of the scientific method were *created* in Black communities, for example WEB Dubois' work in sociology and data visualization: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366292334_Anti-racism_for_Freethinkers_Cultivating_a_Mindset_for_Curiosity_and_Scientific_Inquiry_in_the_Context_of_Racial_Equity_and_Social_Justice and the "medical abolitionist network" that Frederick Douglass was involved with: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335569316_Anti-Racist_Technoscience_A_Generative_Tradition
You could think of this as recovering epistemic commitment pools from African American history, just as you are describing the recovery of economic commitment pools from Indigenous history.
Great expansion Ron.
You’re right: relational memory in one pool is not the whole of grassroots epistemology. A single pool is like a synapse - it can surface fulfilled promises, but it cannot, by itself, reliably/fully test competing claims or correct false intuitions. As you note, stories of trust can generate both deep wisdom and dangerous pseudoscience.
This is where I see the analogy to a brain of pools ... each pool is a limited node of coherence, but when federated (linked through trust, diversity of commitments, and feedback) they begin to approximate the conditions for deeper inquiry. Hypotheses (like value propositions) can circulate, be tested across contexts, and corrected when patterns emerge. A lone pool can hold “detox” claims. A network of pools, each comparing outcomes, makes it easier to see what regenerates and what corrodes.
So here the scientific method is not foreign ... it’s like relational discipline. Controlled experiments, data sharing, peer review: all of these can be seen as protocolized forms of pooling commitments. Agents promise to test carefully, to document results, to expose claims to others’ scrutiny. If those commitments are made visible in the pool, the network can reinforce scientific rigor just as it does reciprocity (and value adjustment) in economics.
Du Bois’ data visualizations, medical abolitionist networks ... great stuff (focusing on context). They look exactly like what we’d call epistemic commitment pools: collective promises to test, record, and share knowledge for the sake of liberation.
The tragedy, as you point out, is that stripping Black communities of access to scientific method (and relational memory in general) was itself a form of extraction. Recovering that is inseparable from recovering economic pools: both are about restoring the means of regeneration, one for knowledge, one for livelihood (those two really shouldn't be separated).
So yes - I’d phrase it like this ... Pooling is not only economic (in the financial sense). It is epistemic ... (economic management of the home). And just as ecological or social pools federate into a commons that resists capture, epistemic pools federate into a living brain where stories are tested, knowledge evolves, and trust is both emotional and empirical.
This feels to me like the next frontier: weaving epistemic and economic pooling together, so the same mycelial network routes care, livelihoods, and truth-testing.
Yes that is exactly where I was going with this. Sounds like we might need another meetup!
I would love to explore how epistemic pooling and economic pooling can weave together in practice. To assess/reassess claims and discern a helpful, regenerative practice from what is here called “psuedoscience”—how can this be done w kindness, empathy and care? And how can it be tracked? It seems that the value for inquiry & uncertainty must be celebrated & woven into the texture of the agreements…
Also, how can economic pooling include the implicate of these epistemic principles?
Those are all the right questions, not sure I have a lot of answers. One challenge that I think you are (rightly!) hinting at is that at the grassroots, you have belief in "alternative" treatments that entangle really good insights with "new age" marketing and commodification. Herbal treatments for example really can be effective--not only cheaper and safer, but also nicely tied to economic pooling with those harvesting from the wild or growing in local farms. But they have been commodified by exploitative companies that make false marketing claims. At the same time, "big pharma" has its own pseudoscience: for example the claim that we must forbid sale of low-cost generic meds because of quality concerns.
So grassroots knoweldge has two opponents: large corporations that dominate the market, and explotative "alternative medicine" corporations that make false claims.
One approach to help folks at the grassroots "disentangle" the two sources of misinformation from authentic knoweldge is using what is called "citizen science". There are some great examples here: https://www.csresources.org/our-history
This is so beautifully written - it reads to me as if it distils years if not decades of both thinking and practice (tacit and consciously formal) into crystal clear language that reads like instant common sense (why did I never put it this way before and why are we not all following this?). Thank you for sharing this!
Glad it resonates with you!