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Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

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Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to English kings, Charles becoming Karl is not that bad, comparing to James, which somehow becomes Яков (Iakov?!). It is also a mostly one way effect, as Russian names are usually transliterated into English without some special weirdness, even royal names. Anyway, it is very common to transliterate Пётр as Peter, though Pyotr seems even more common.

>James, which somehow becomes Яков (Iakov?!) Quoting Wikipedia: "It is a modern descendant, through Old French James , of Vulgar Latin Iacomus , a derivative version of Latin Iacobus , Latin form of the Hebrew name Jacob "

Well thanks, Cap! ;)

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#52
post #19

I produced a free ebook edition of Mutual Aid for Standard Ebooks last year: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid It's very readable and quite interesting. It aimed to have a veneer of science, when the science of animals and nature was still fairly undeveloped; and it succeeded in a sense, because its observations are still held in regard, but I think it succeeded much better as a work of phi…

> mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense I'd argue the fact that humans can live in reasonably stable polities of more than a billion people proves, and in an economic space of practically the entire planet (globalisation!) proves we absolutely can cooperate at grand, epic scales.Whether or not that means Kropotkin is right is anothe…

I'd argue that the fact that humans can live in reasonably stable polities of more than a billion people only proves that there exist social systems and structures which can achieve reasonable outcomes even without cooperation by incentives which ensure that agents who do not intend to cooperate but act competitively and even maliciously still act reasonably out of pure self-interest and fear of retaliation for defecting.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#53
post #19

I produced a free ebook edition of Mutual Aid for Standard Ebooks last year: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid It's very readable and quite interesting. It aimed to have a veneer of science, when the science of animals and nature was still fairly undeveloped; and it succeeded in a sense, because its observations are still held in regard, but I think it succeeded much better as a work of phi…

> mankind has demonstrated through thousands of years of history that tribes of men can't really cooperate in any grand sense I'd argue the fact that humans can live in reasonably stable polities of more than a billion people proves, and in an economic space of practically the entire planet (globalisation!) proves we absolutely can cooperate at grand, epic scales.Whether or not that means Kropotkin is right is anothe…

We are not cooperating at grand scales, not in what matters to the average person, but we certainly cooperate on helping the rich get richer.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#55
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what ways has mankind demonstrated that "tribes of men" can't cooperate? Humans have been able to live in large decentralized polities for millennia and modern archeology strongly backs this up. Göbekli Tepe (~11kya), the still-standing mammoth houses of North Eastern Europe (~15kya), or perhaps best exemplified by "the new archaic" or "monuments without kings"[^0] which is a term used by archeologists to describe…

Mutual Aid Among Animals mentions the existence of Defectors. I would argue both that the existence of the internet in particular and civilisation in general is a sign that great numbers of people can cooperate effectively, and that the woeful Covid response is a sign that small numbers of people defecting can be ruinous. The best laid plans of mice and men, therefore, would seem to be those that (a) allow Cooperator…

Defectors implies authoritarianism, and my way or the highway thinking. which have generally been the enemy of overall cooperation. Wikipedia and the internet work because they mostly aren't like that, and are at their worst when they are.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mutual Aid Among Animals mentions the existence of Defectors. I would argue both that the existence of the internet in particular and civilisation in general is a sign that great numbers of people can cooperate effectively, and that the woeful Covid response is a sign that small numbers of people defecting can be ruinous. The best laid plans of mice and men, therefore, would seem to be those that (a) allow Cooperator…

Defectors implies authoritarianism, and my way or the highway thinking. which have generally been the enemy of overall cooperation. Wikipedia and the internet work because they mostly aren't like that, and are at their worst when they are.

Hmm, if someone "defects" wikipedia and doesn't edit it, no big deal.

But there absolutely are edit wars and battles of authority and admin bans etc.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#57
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? I'm going to transliterate stuff from Russian with ё from now on, it just looks great. A language is whatever we want it to be, after all

You'll hardly achieve anything by it, besides really breaking spellchecking software.

And annoying the language speakers. Pёtr is painful to read. Peter, Pyotr, Peter, Пётр, pick any, but don't mix and match please!

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diaeresis is used in English as well. The New Yorker writes “coordinate” as “coördinate”. It has the same meaning as in many European writing systems — “pronounce independently”. So it’s like “co ore” not like “core”. It’s also common to see it in loan words and proper names, even with a different meaning.

In Russian ë is a completely separate letter pronounced "yo". This is non-intuitive to English speakers, which is why the name in question is almost always anglicized as Pyotr, not "Pëtr".

> It's really weird seeing letter ё in English language title.

It’s not, for the varied reasons I gave. I know that this is yet another variant. I agree there is a problem with it in that its meaning is not well-known (so you may want to use more well-known alternatives), but not that the diacritic itself is “weird” or foreign to English language users.

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#59
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different because in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix. Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive. That said, I also like it, but it means something different here.

You probably meant French, because the word is just borrowed from French, including the dots.

In older texts the notation appears on other words like coöperation. Some Americans use dieresis in their names as well (Zoë and Chloë are increasingly common for example). Furthermore the dieresis (trema in French) in naïf is doing the same job as a dieresis in English, so it can be easy to make the claim that we got all dieresis from French, but in reality it seems to have been borrowed from Ancient Greek as late as the 1600s, and gone directly from Ancient Greek texts to the languages that use the notation today (Galician, English, French, Occitan, Dutch)

Re: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mutual Aid Among Animals mentions the existence of Defectors. I would argue both that the existence of the internet in particular and civilisation in general is a sign that great numbers of people can cooperate effectively, and that the woeful Covid response is a sign that small numbers of people defecting can be ruinous. The best laid plans of mice and men, therefore, would seem to be those that (a) allow Cooperator…

Defectors implies authoritarianism, and my way or the highway thinking. which have generally been the enemy of overall cooperation. Wikipedia and the internet work because they mostly aren't like that, and are at their worst when they are.

Defect and Cooperate are terms of art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma#Generalized...

In a "one hand washes the other" model of cooperation, the right hand would be defecting if it was frequently washed by the left, while never (or infrequently) washing in return.

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