DTM.1 - Distinguish Dependence, Cooperation and Parasitic Use

Type: Method Status: Stable

DTM.1:1 - Problem frame

Use this when a spreading practice, component or tool relies on other participants’ resources and someone concludes that this dependence makes it harmful—or that its popularity makes it beneficial.

A team using an external reasoning service may deliver better results while losing an alternative way to obtain them. A new exchange standard may help its users while imposing conversion work elsewhere. A teaching technique may be copied widely without producing the ability its learners wanted. In each case, determine what continues or spreads and what changes for those who support and use it.

The first result is a small account of the dependence and its consequences under a stated comparison. It lets the participants distinguish useful support, cooperation, extraction at another’s expense and an unresolved relation before choosing a response.

For a routine purchase with known service conditions and no question about continuation or spread, use the applicable procurement or operational method. This method is useful when the relation itself is being misclassified.

DTM.1:2 - Problem

Dependence, replication advantage and useful work are different relations. A method description can be copied while competent performance disappears. A provider can gain more customers while those customers also gain. A variant can persist because it brings benefits, because alternatives are inaccessible, or because its continuation is rewarded even when the work suffers.

Classifying the whole situation as “parasitism” conceals which of these mechanisms would have to change. Conversely, calling it “cooperation” can conceal a cost transferred to someone outside the comparison.

DTM.1:3 - Forces

DTM.1:4 - Solution

Name what continues, recover what supports it, compare the consequences, then characterize the relation.

DTM.1:4.1 - Identify the variant and its continuation

Choose the unit whose continuation is in question. For a working practice, distinguish the method used, a description of it, its competent execution and the participants capable of teaching it. For a device or program, distinguish installed instances from the design and its revisions.

State the criterion by which a later occurrence counts as continuation or a changed variant. A short operational distinction may suffice: “a report prepared with this procedure and checked against independent measurements,” rather than “the same culture.” Where learning changes the method, retain that change for DTM.2.

Then identify the participants and means that enable this continuation: an executor, a provider, an organization allocating time, a communication channel, or an archive. These examples are different relations, not a compulsory list of parts.

DTM.1:4.2 - Recover the enabling relation

Ask what contribution would be absent if the supporting participant or resource were unavailable. Describe the resulting loss and whether another available contribution could replace it. Distinguish dependence on one supplier from dependence on the kind of contribution.

For example, the practice may need an external solver, without needing this particular solver. Alternatively, its records may be readable only by the present service. These relations call for different continuations: obtaining a substitute, making the representation portable, changing the practice, or accepting the dependence for the intended work.

Use a model or a safe bounded comparison when withdrawal would disrupt real work. An unperformed counterfactual remains a hypothesis. Loss under withdrawal establishes dependence; it does not yet establish harm during supported use.

DTM.1:4.3 - Compare results for the affected participants

Recover whose result matters, for which work and over what horizon. A.6.P.RI helps repair expressions such as “our benefit,” “the system is safe” or “they are dependent.”

Choose a feasible comparison: continuing the present arrangement, using an available alternative, or changing one contribution. For each materially affected participant, retain useful output, required expenditure, exposure to failure and capacity for later work where those differences change the choice. The relevant domain methods define and measure these quantities.

A difference is meaningful only against that comparison. If a provider bears a conversion cost in one arrangement and the customer bears it in another, keep both allocations visible. Do not place the cost in an unnamed total and then attribute the resulting advantage to each participant.

When consequences remain unknown, identify the missing relation that changes the conclusion. It may be sufficient to proceed under two conditional accounts. A new investigation is useful only if its result could improve the receiving decision enough to warrant its cost.

DTM.1:4.4 - Relate continuation to consequences

Now compare the variant’s continuation with the effects just recovered.

These are not permanent types of people or organizations. Several relations may coexist: cooperation between two participants can impose harm on a third. The description also does not settle what intervention is legitimate; the applicable agreements, rights and decision methods do that work.

The minimal output can be one sentence: “This procedure depends on the shared service, improves current output while the service is available, and leaves the team without a tested substitute.” That is already enough to consider a substitute or a different assurance arrangement without calling either participant a parasite.

DTM.1:4.5 - Choose the next modeling question

Use DTM.2 when the uncertainty concerns adoption or further transmission; DTM.3 when participants change through use and thereby change transmission. Use DTM.5 for a conflict between within-group and between-group change, and DTM.7 only when a shared mechanism may be serving a different result.

If the comparison removes the alleged harm, stop the harmful-variant branch. If only the choice among already understood arrangements remains, return to the existing selection and improvement methods. A new dynamic model is not required to preserve an already sufficient conclusion.

DTM.1:5 - Archetypal Grounding

DTM.1:5.1 - A service improves work but concentrates dependence

Consider a hypothetical team whose old process yields 10 acceptable analyses per week. With a service it yields 14 at an additional cost affordable for the work. Under an outage the supported process yields only 4; a tested substitute would yield 9.

The method produces three separate comparisons. Current supported output improved by 4. Current outage exposure is larger than before. Replaceability would reduce that exposure, but would not preserve all normal output. None of these differences alone proves exploitation. The next action depends on the required continuity, supplier conditions and cost of the substitute.

If the supplier benefits from continued use, that fact also does not settle parasitism: both parties may benefit. Evidence that a supplier deliberately obstructs portability would introduce a further causal claim, not retroactively change these numerical comparisons.

DTM.1:5.2 - The same spread permits opposite evaluations

Suppose a conditional population model gives fractions 0.30, 0.25 and 0.45 in three modes of tool use. Scores of 1, 0.5 and 0.1 for a separately specified task give a mean of 0.47. Scores of 1, 1.4 and 0.9 for another justified assessment give 1.055.

The arithmetic is a constructed example, not measurements of users. Its purpose is to expose the missing premise: state fractions do not determine task performance. The practitioner must supply the task, capability criterion and evidence for the scores. A model of spread cannot supply them merely by naming one state “dependent.”

DTM.1:5.3 - A remembered movement is not the promised capability

A learner can recall a turn sequence and depend on a teacher’s cues while still failing to coordinate balance and timing. Separate the transmitted description, the cue-supported execution and independent execution under the intended conditions. The dependence may be useful temporary support. Calling it harmful before comparing learning outcomes would obscure the missing coordination method.

The next inquiry concerns the relevant bodily, rhythmic and learning methods. DTM does not infer a physical cause from the learner’s difficulty.

DTM.1:6 - Bias-Annotation

The word “parasite” can turn a disputed comparison into an apparent natural classification. Keep the claim about a specified relation and its effects. An evaluator’s preferred independence is not automatically the participant’s objective.

A focus on immediate output can hide future exposure; a focus on unaided performance can hide the value of reliable tools. Compare both only when the receiving work requires them.

DTM.1:7 - Conformance Checklist

• The account distinguishes the continuing variant, its realization and the participants or means supporting it.
• Withdrawal or substitution bears on dependence; a separate comparison bears on usefulness or harm.
• Each material consequence has a recipient, horizon and feasible comparison.
• A parasitic-use claim names the enabling or diversion mechanism and the impaired work, rather than relying on unfamiliarity or popularity.
• Unknown effects and conditional changes remain visible; the next action does not require a settled moral label.

DTM.1:8 - Common Anti-Patterns and How to Avoid Them

Dependence is damage. Replace the inference with the enabling relation and a comparison of supported, interrupted and alternative work.

Spread is approval. Obtain evidence of the work’s result separately from counts of adoption.

The organization benefits, so everyone benefits. Restore recipients and cost allocation before combining outcomes.

Classify first, explain later. Describe the enabling relation and effects first; retain an unresolved characterization when the evidence does not select one.

DTM.1:9 - Consequences

The participant can choose what to preserve, replace or investigate without treating every dependence as failure. The account can also expose a conflict hidden by an aggregate improvement. It costs more than assigning a label, but may finish with a few sentences instead of a population model.

DTM.1:10 - Rationale

Continuation and useful work answer different questions. Their separation makes it possible to understand cooperation, exploitation and changing relations with the same method while retaining the differing causal mechanisms. The comparison is supplied by the actual work, not by an assumption that autonomy or collective growth is always preferable.

DTM.1:11 - SoTA-Echoing

Solé et al., Large-Language Models as a Cognitive Virus (2026 preprint) distinguish dynamics of coupling states from an illustrative competence measure. This method adopts that separation, without taking their state names as diagnoses or their chosen scores as universal measurements.

Fields and Levin, Cognitive Offloading Is a Cognitive Universal (2026 preprint) provide a competing starting point: external support is not inherently a defect. The method uses that challenge to the independence default; it does not require the paper’s stronger universal physical claims.

Koonin, The first major transition (2026 preprint) distinguishes replication autonomy from contribution to a collective in its early-life model. This supports keeping the two questions separate; it does not establish the corresponding cultural relations.

The subject-level synthesis here compares enabling dependence, continuation and consequences. C.36 supplies cultural relations, A.6.P.RI the reference repair, and D.3/D.4 the treatment of conflicts across interests and levels. None alone establishes the subject-specific effects, which remain a modeling and evidence question.

DTM.1:12 - Relations

• DTM.2 constructs adoption and variant-change laws after the continuing unit is identified.
• DTM.3 connects participant change and further spread.
• DTM.5 distinguishes selection within and among collectives; DTM.7 investigates a particular diversion mechanism.
• DTM.8/.9 use the identified consequences to model protective action and its feedback.
• C.36, A.6.P.RI, D.3/D.4 retain their general cultural, reference and conflict contributions.

DTM.1:End