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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

> That's the point of the post.

I lost it in the post. Whenever I hear the “crisis” part presented without the perfectly rational explanation I get frustrated and spend more time trying to figure out if this is a problem.

Saying “maps distort the way we see the world” is a problem unless you immediately follow it with “and that’s ok because…”

Otherwise we waste time on stuff like “eyeballs distort the way we see the world” when it’s true but not an issue at all.

Especially since the first paragraph mentions how countries closer to the equator tend to be poorer. As if that’s somehow relevant.

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I don't understand what you're saying. The article doesn't present this as a crisis. It doesn't really make sense to say it's okay or not okay, except insofar as anything that isn't an existential threat is okay, I suppose.

The second sentence of the article strongly implies some nefarious concentration of power and wealth among the globally powerful countries is at the root of the popularity of mercator projections.

That is entirely on you tho. Becasuse that sentence does not imply anything about concentration of power nor about globally powerful countries and even nothing about origin of popularity of mercator projections.

It does imply that poor countries around equator are bigger then they look like. That is it.

It literally does. Dont play ignorant.

Well, they is a "nefarious concentration of power and wealth among the globally powerful countries". And the Mercator projection does suit them practically, and shows their countries bigger than they are, so...

So...?

> And the Mercator projection does suit them practically, and shows their countries bigger than they are, so...

So what?

Do these countries become more powerful, richer, or have more resources than others because they are represented bigger on a common map projection? If so, then let's just hope that our new overlords from the Antarctican Coalition are benign emperors :D

>Do these countries become more powerful, richer, or have more resources than others because they are represented bigger on a common map projection?

No. They become so by colonizing and stealing other's resources. Then the map projections that are convenient for them, are imposed upon the rest of humanity.

This, among other legitimate uses, has the side-benefit for them of presenting said countries as larger than they are, and thus being one more way to subconsciously hammer onto everybody their superiority at that level too...

> They become so by colonizing and stealing other's resources.

Pretty sure all of the former colonies are independent nations by now, and have been for more than a generation.

> Then the map projections that are convenient for them, are imposed upon the rest of humanity.

Excuse me? Who is imposing what on whom now, and how?

Last time I checked, everyone is free to use whatever map projection they want, centered on whatever point of the globe they want. Or they can use an actual globe.

> has the side-benefit for them of presenting said countries as larger than they are, and thus being one more way to subconsciously hammer onto everybody their superiority at that level too...

Yeah, pretty sure I don't perceive Antarctica as some kind of superior super-nation. Or greenland, although I gotta say, it's a really cool place, especially during summer.

>Pretty sure all of the former colonies are independent nations by now, and have been for more than a generation.

Yes. And if someone breaks your legs, you should totally be able to run a marathon after, say, 15 years. After all, they haven't broke your legs for a while.

History and national development doesn't work like that. A major handicap can still keep you back for centuries.

It's even more than a handicap relatively too. It's not just that you were held down (and the other side neutral): the handicap for you was at the same time an enrichment off your back for the other side.

Even more more so, since "independent nations" is mostly a facade for the busines as usual, of neocolonialism: the same shit, but somewhat more convert (bribing politicians, setting up banana-republic conditions, if needed bringing in the army, supporting this or that dictator into power, and so on, and using monetary policy and foreign aid to make sure they never stand on their legs).

Yeah, I'm not gonna discuss colonialism here. Multiple generations are a long time to get things in order. Many countries rebuilt from scratch into powerful industrialized nations within decades after major wars.

And it's also not the topic of the discussion tbh. This is about the impact of the Mercator projection, and unless I get to see a peer reviewed study convincing me otherwise, my point stands.

I read it as the post is simply pointing out something that a large percentage of the population was not even aware about. I don't think it goes any deeper than that.

Why is it important that poor people live near the equator? I expect that a large part of the population is aware of this fact.

So bringing it up doesn’t contribute to the article and is a bit off in the article. Why not mention that the days are longer in the summer away from the equator. Or they people near the equator have darker pigment. Or many other true but irrelevant facts.

Because the equator in the Mercator projection is the closest to "true size"...which means that the wealthier nations, well above that, are in fact exacerbated in apparent land mass.

I like this site[1] for showing the true size of countries on a standard projection. Look at how much the US actually changes in size when you move it's latitude even a little.

Like it or not, the perception of scale of a problem is linked to apparent size - Africa looks smaller then it is, whereas the European countries look a lot larger then they are. When we talk about a problem affecting somewhere, the idea that "most of the world is experiencing it" is contraindicated by our maps even if only subconsciously.

[1] https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc0MzY1MDE.NTAzNDg...

Nobody looks at a map before saying “most of the world is experiencing X”. This is a fantasy straw man.

No one claimed people do this. You have created a straw man-ception. Our awareness of the world is informed by distorted maps, even if it only impacts us subconsciously.

No it’s not. Nobody cares about Greenland despite it being larger than all of Europe on the projection.

Well I actually used to think - before being educated about map constraints and the Mercator projection - that "Wow Greenland is HUGE".

How old were you when you learned that though? I thought the same thing until we were shown why it’s misleading in like the 4th grade.

Obviously not. And nobody said that. Talk about straw men.

People have internalized a sense of the relative sizes of different countries, and that internal representation is what they refer to.

The obvious implication made by mentioning it is that it's somehow connected.

Maybe the future article will try to claim that we like Mercator because it matches apparent size to importance.

Maybe it'll try to claim that wealth differences are caused by different apparent size.

With the current fashion being to see all inequalities as imposed by force, the later seems more likely.

... And since the date on the post is a couple months ago, I looked for that follow up and it was two days later but mostly paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-decei...

The blurb at least sounds like it is indeed exploring that second option, but the meat of whatever argument and conclusion isn't public.

The poor countries claim has a footnote and a promise to explore it in another article. It doesn't say anything further about this.

The article also doesn't answer whether the distortions are intentional, a side-effect, a trade-off, or a combination of some of this. The author promises a follow-up article, unfortunately a "premium" one which I suppose you must pay for (edit: sadly, it's paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-decei...)

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