This, of course, is the point of the article. It was so predictable that it made me wonder: who is telling me that top is good and lower is bad? The articles themselves.
> And high is better than low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your brain, because feet stink and hair doesn’t stink as much, because it’s better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above—you really have to be in an attic—while you often hurt yourself falling. That’s why up is angelic and down devilish.
You could also argue that because of gravity and potential energy, up is usually the result of purposive action and effort, while down is often the result of accident or neglect ("you often hurt yourself falling"). That potential energy (and wide-open space) can also be used for maneuvering, so if two people or other creatures are fighting, one who is higher is generally at an advantage compared to one who is lower or lying on the ground. The lower party has less energy available to direct toward the opponent, and usually less room to move, being more constrained by the presence of the ground.
Tell that to a BJJ fighter.
It's very likely carcinogenic too, but now I don't know what to expect on the correlation, because it's possible that people die from it before they get the chance of developing a tumor.
We're deep in contrivance at this point.
Interestingly, Aristotelian physics would have described down as "the true, appropriate place" for material objects and "up" as the unnatural state, only produced by violence and bound to be corrected by the universe.
Your point about Aristotle is well-taken.
The book: https://archive.org/details/lakoff-george-metaphors-we-live-...
Norvig's review discussing the book in the context of AI: https://norvig.com/mwlb.html
The problem is when from that we derive, with little justification and with the by now widely recognized horrible standards of social science, that in those rationalizations lie very important hidden truths about our society and psychology.
Many things boil down to an implicit association test of some sort, and that's now considered basically junk science.
There's a pipeline in which basically anything that can be considered a social issue in some way can get picked up by someone in the social sciences whose biases it confirms and given a justification, and since it has a political backing and is powered by preconceived bias and academia it goes through and actually has a negative effect on the world.
The stupid Stanford prison experiment. Facilitated communication. Power posing. Trigger warnings. Learning styles. Priming. All bullshit. All popular. All part of "the science".
And people wonder why there's a problem of institutional trust.
Do you have people to look up to, or do you spend more time looking down on others?
Are you on top of the world, or working your way up from the bottom?
Etc, etc. It's suffused throughout our language, and not just this one language, either.
Also "being down" to do something likely came from writing your name down as a commitment, or putting a bet down, committing your money.
What do you mean by discriminatory?
A layman who is not familiar with the reasons behind Global North/South would not think about imperialist relations. I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.
Global North/South makes no sense at all, again from a layman's perspective. From the original story:
> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’
When I see Australia in the southern hemisphere being characterised as "North", I think that the creator of this term is discriminating against countries they consider inferior. There is no room for growth here. A country being characterised as "South" will always be as such, because intuitively we know we can't switch geographies.
Personally I don't care what language is being used as long as the real conditions are being brought to light. Persecutory investigations into psychology on these matters are dead ends. The successful adoption of "Native" and "developing" did not liberate.
"Developing" what, and to what end? The term itself sounds absolute, where in fact it implies a relative order, but doesn't give away what (arbitrary) properties you include in the comparison.
Take Gross National Happiness or the Happy Planet Index, for example. You could very well call countries with a low but slowly rising GNH "developing countries". USA is 122/152 in the HPI, which sounds about right, and probably not "developing" but declining.
The point is that the imperial West defines what is "good" and "bad", and from that point of reference uses terminology that implies an absoluteness; as another example, as if "long life" is a universal goal of humanity, when in fact other cultures prioritize community over individuals. (There's no point in valuing a "long life" when you believe in reincarnation.)
To discriminate between developed and developing countries also means you assume some countries are somewhat "finished" where others can play "catch up", which is not how global economies actually work: Capitalism requires winners and losers.
I come, rob your house, take away most of what you have, and call you "savage". I then give you "development aid", telling you how to spend it and make you dependent on my services and "assistance", calling you "developing". How does that feel? Are we interacting on eye level, or am I looking down on you?
Slow and steady with a plan like Singapore or Taiwan wins the race. Shortcuts, seeking aid from China or the IMF only benefits the local caudilloes.
I'd perhaps call that cynicism.
It’s doable but people will have to want it. It doesn’t come free and it doesn’t come by listening to charlatans like Marx and his peddlers who promise utopia at no cost but the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. From then on it should be all roses in a land of milk and honey. No, sorry, it takes lots of work, delayed gratification and multi-generational effort to get to a good place like Singapore did or even Chile relatively speaking. You need someone with strong singular vision a a populace willing to follow it through. Why even Salvador after decades of civil war is able to overcome its difficulties and now enjoy great personal safety -the best in the western hemisphere. A country doesn’t have to stay stuck in a bad place.
North/South doesn't have anything to do with it, anyway, as you alluded to. What people actually want to talk about is whether a country is a former colonial master, a former settler colony or a former extractive colony (or possibly multiple of these, as with e.g. the US).
How? Most of the population in the southern hemisphere is in ex-colonies from the north; our cultures are thus full of concepts that don't really work but we make do. Simple things like all the holidays being inappropriately aligned to the seasons, or the constellations in our skies being afterthoughts in the system, or of course maps being north up without a second thought.
Nope. That one is the worst of the choices.
The way to think about it is along economic, social, and infra/tech dimensions, and are not coupled to culture or ethnicity (your "white western").
Specifically, developing countries:
- Economic: low income, underdeveloped industry
- Social: lower quality of life, limited access to basic services (jobs, food, clean water, education, healthcare, housing)
- Infra/tech: poor infrastructure, limited access to technology
Furthermore, the following countries in Europe ("white") can be considered developing: Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. while Japan is not developing (and not "white western").
Some countries have a high HDI (e.g. in Africa you can think of Algeria, Egypt, South Africa, Morocco, Botswana, etc.) but can still be considered developing on other dimensions.
In the Middle East, counties like Qatar, UAE, Israel, Kuwait, and Bahrain can be considered developed (and not "white western").
If so, do you have a plan for emigrating?
If you've no plan, why not?
Developing is a fine word, with little taint.
You remind me of a lady who objected to me saying "retarded" who then righteously lectured me about not saying retarded, and she proceeded to give an example of her having a friend in a wheelchair as to why the word was offensive. I couldn't even start to tell her just how grossly disgusting her comments were.
Parts of reality suck, but denying reality sucks even harder - especially if you think you are helping less developed peoples.
Australia is the funny one.
They may deserve to be reclassified now, although their GDP per capita is still much lower than the US.
My wife is Chinese and last year we went to my father in law's home village in Hebei and stayed with his brother and his family. They have a really nice bungalow they moved into about 10 years ago in a compound right next to the decaying remains of their former house. Almost the whole village has been rebuilt in the last few decades. Hardly anywhere in China is anything like the way it was 30 years ago.
Growing up in Shropshire in the 70s and 80s there were plenty of people in the little villages and isolated farm houses that lived like it was still the 1800s. France too in the early 2000s. Development is never evenly distributed.
Alternatively, "Global North" is just code for "white", with a few apartheid-style token "honorary whites" like Japan added.
I also love that Singapore is both 'developing' on this list and int the Small Island Developing States list, despite it easily being in the top 10 of most developed countries in the world.
Regional politics is complicated. Australia needs to be in the ASEAN group. We have common interests in regional security and stability and have complementary capabilities and resources. But its convenient to label us as outsiders and characterise us as imperialists or American agents (which sadly we sort of are but give us some options). Doesn't matter that we are right here and 20% of our population originated from the asian countries to the north of us. For some reason we are on the imperialist side.
For one, starting at the top and ending at the bottom is natural progress of things because of gravity.
I’m not sure if that means anything, but down-to-up seems very unnatural (of coure I can’t ignore my cultural biases). Is there any writing systems like that?
It’s all arbitrary.
is this a contrarian impulse or an anti-contrarian impulse?
A green flag for me that someone might be an expert is when their attitude towards answering a questions has that “it depends” energy.
Others have made a possibly more relevant point - in one direction, your arm/hand will block what you have already written.
I agree human mechanics is likely the reason people tend to write down rather than up though. But I’d say it’s more about our muscles, we’re stronger pulling our arms in than pushing them out. But I’m no expert so would never claim confidence in my assumption there.
Writing is done by people and people are almost always subject to gravity. It's one of the 4 fundamental forces. Energy minimization is not an arbitrary selection criteria, it's central to the fitness/design of all living things.
Any one can make arbitrary reasons to support a decision.
where is your writing-capable organ relative to your reading organs?
Aren’t most of the people and land and things in the North part? A casual Google [0] suggests 88% of the humans, for example?
I don’t understand the “good” and “bad” thing, but it does make sense to me that you scan something “earlier” or “later” in casting your eye across a mass of stuff.
If we read from top to bottom… doesn't it make sense to put the part where the stuff is earlier in order than the part with mainly oceans?
It makes slightly more sense to me to argue about which continental masses should go on the left or the right of the map, e.g. [1]. Although compositionally, if you put the Eurasian continent on the left side (“first” for left-to-right readers), doesn’t the massive Pacific exaggerate the impression of a discontinuity or a vast gap between geographical clusters of humans?
[0] https://brilliantmaps.com/human-hemisphere/#:~:text=88%25%20...
[1] https://www.mapresources.com/products/world-digital-vector-r...
The author has an inferiority complex.
Up-and-coming.
Top-of-the-line.
I could go on, but I don't want to get you down.
We generally read top down because of this. We generally want the bulk of information at the same level as our eyes. It's why tv's aren't on the ground.
I feel like many are overthinking this.
Same reason for writing left to right probably (given someone that writes with the right, but that seems to be more common).
Anyhow it's a matter of trade-offs and each society ended up with different ones - I mean direction I find least controversial, think of Chinese and Ancient Egyptian scripts that are logographic - why did they end up with that?
We can also analyze if some convention makes sense or not and why, even if the initial decision was taken for the "wrong" (or some irrational) reasons (ex: the village priest heard a voice).
1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/194855061140104...
Absolutely terrible study. Full paper is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258189192_Spatial_M...
Studies of American college students to prove some sort of universal rule about human psychology.
There’s embarrassing papers that get published in every field but social sciences is where they always try and put a moralistic element in as well.
Sigh.