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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

Maybe more accurate is that there wasn’t some nefarious bias that was meant to oppress people.

Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It’s a simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we’d be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.

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I'd argue that, by coincidence, putting Africa/Europe in roughly the centre happens to be the most sensible. Extraterrestrials with no knowledge of humans would probably do this.

The reason for this is that it's the most "geographical centric" location, with the Americas to the left and Asia to the right, with the huge pacific ocean pushed to the edges. If you place China in the centre then you're "wasting" a lot of space on the pacific. I think [1] is a worse map because significant parts of the world are pushed to the edge in favour of the pacific, which takes centre stage.

You also see this if you zoom out on Google Maps as far as it will allow, putting Africa/Europe in the centre still shows you most of the world's landmasses, but if you put China in the centre it's almost as if the Americas haven't been discovered yet.

[1]: https://studycli.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/china-world-...

Maybe instead of putting Europe in the middle we could do something sensible like put the split left-right edges down the middle of the widest ocean.

>Europe was at the center because they made the maps. It’s a simple reason. If some other culture has been dominant we’d be using a projection that makes it more useful for them.

IMO Simply moving the Mercator projection to be centered on China is far more meaningful than changing the projection. The entire world revolved around China and trading with it for thousands of years, and you much more immediately understand things such as

1. The importance of the silk road and the middle east. (and thereby the importance of controlling that region and thus the legacy of the Byzantines and later Ottoman Empire. To say nothing of Persia, The Greeks, etc)

2. The nature of the Eurasian steppes (It's staggeringly big and OP for horses)

3. The tendency to forget about those big oceans of certain death, as they were for tens of thousands of years. Europeans only sailed through them to get to china and avoid paying taxes to Muslims, after all.

4. Why, given the above, the Chinese call the 1840s to 1940s the "Century of humiliation"

I'm sure I'm omitting a lot of stuff but That was Human History for much longer than the Euroamerican order

Fyi China calls itself 'Zhongguo' — literally 'Middle Kingdom' (Country)

The vast majority of items are manufactured in Asia now, especially globes. By your logic, should they unilaterally start printing Asia in the center?

Unilaterally? If they want to use maps that center Asia in their education and work, who is stopping them? In fact I'd wager they start their education by learning about the geography of Asia first.

I'm puzzled by this demonization of simply observing the world from the perspective of one's own culture. Blaming Europeans for putting Europe in the center of their maps is like blaming Italians for teaching Italian in school, and not some globally-representative language (maybe English or Chinese) chosen without local "bias".

Though your mention of "especially globes" has me wondering how they would place Asia in the center of a globe...

Saying there is a bias is not an accusation of wrong doing or "demonization".

It's crazy how populists and misinformation agents have successfully convinced people that any mention of a potential bias is an "woke" attack on their whole personality and world view.

Only if you count bad evangelists as "misinformation agents". There are unfortunately plenty of bad actors who have persistently tried to use it as a social cudgel and an excuse to fight for social dominance, shield oneself from being questioned (including self-reflection), and to write others off. To be frank, it is no wonder people view it as an attack when that is exactly what it has been used for.

For a similar patterns of bad behavior by the same actors look at the utterly terrible framing and naming of white priveledge, where not having problems nobody should have to deal with is phrased as if not being discriminated against is a moral problem!

Not necessarily, but usually. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36422476 linked a clip from the West Wing that blames biased Eurocentric maps for perpetuating colonialism.

Globes?? They do not suffer (much?) from the map projection problem. And no, they should not be printing any part of the world in the center of the globe!

> Globes?? They do not suffer (much?) from the map projection problem.

They do if you try hard enough. Introducing the infamous Poland Globe:

https://www.maproomblog.com/2020/09/these-globes-are-uncanny...

This isn’t my logic, it’s the logic of the map designers.

It’s not important where they are made. It’s important where they are designed.

I expect there’s lots of maps with Asia in the center, but I don’t expect people in the US to buy them.

First you said the center is decided by who made the maps.

Then you changed it to who designed the maps.

In your last sentence you implied that the buyers make the decision.

Make up your mind?

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