Comment by usrbinbash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by usrbinbash | Hacker News Reader

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> The trade-offs between different projections are rarely discussed

And?

The trade-offs between longpolling and websockets are rarely discussed outside of very small cohorts. The tradeoff between wankel-engines and piston-based motors are rarely discussed. The tradeoffs between oak and pearwood are rarely discussed.

That's why our society has division of labor and people becoming experts in their topics.

And I am pretty sure experts on cartography have discussed the different merits and tradeoffs and converged on Mercator for a reason. I don't know what that reason is, and I don't care. It works, I can use it, and as long as no one can point out a tangible problem with it, I see no reason to worry about it. Same as the cartographer doesn't need to know or care why I decided that the chatapp he installed uses longpolling to communicate with the backend instead of a websocket. Same as I don't need to know or care why the carpenter who made my desk used oak instead of pear or rosewood.

And seeing countries as smaller or bigger than they are isn't a problem in my eyes. I can reasonably expect an educated person to know that maps are 3D->2D projections and are thus distorted. If I want to know the exact size, I can always look it up. I don't have a more or less favourable view of a country or its people based on the countries apparent size on a map.

The issue isn't possible bias on the part of educated cartographers and differential geometers. It's the bias of the majority, i.e. everyone else, that matters. A vast majority of people in the "Western world" perceive their countries as being bigger than they are. Thus from a primal, tribal perspective this further inflates their perception of "their peoples" being more important than the peoples of other areas.

> A vast majority of people in the "Western world" perceive their countries as being bigger than they are. Thus from a primal, tribal perspective this further inflates their perception of "their peoples" being more important than the peoples of other areas.

That’s a fun hypothesis, but is there actually data supporting (1) that “a vast majority” of westerners misperceive country size in this way, and (2) that specifically such a perception causes them to consider foreigners to be unimportant?

Although implicit bias exists, studies show its impact on the real world is much smaller than commonly believed.

> Thus from a primal, tribal perspective this further inflates their perception of "their peoples" being more important than the peoples of other areas.

And now I would like to see some data, peer reviewed study, or similarly supported source for this statement.

Because I don't see many people claiming that greenland or antarctica are super important powerhouses in the world.

Nearly no one inhabits Greenland and Antarctica, which might help explain why the only visible relative increase in Arctic/Antarctic nationalism comes from enthusiastic polar bears and mildly racist penguins.

I'm not sure there could even exist a particularly satisfying source for this. One of the issues with "soft" sciences is that it can be quite tricky to measure any effects, much less design a viable study that demonstrates causation.

I suppose a social scientist (i.e., not me) could support this claim using ideas from psychology or finding related studies. But I doubt anything will ever be particularly convincing unless we lived in a universe where people told the objective truth and a mandatory survey was asked with the explicit question, "Have the distortions induced by map projections influenced your beliefs regarding people in other countries?"

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