How come this culture war mindset infuses everything we do online now?
Nowhere does this map or its description even imply you are a bad person.
It's pure ... projection
There it is, the implication that "North is up" is morally bad. Since it's an implication, it does not need to be read that way, but it's clearly there.
I see the statement that the decision of orientation might seem neutral but doesn't turn out that way, but I think reading it as making a moral judgment about any particular orientation might be a stretch. At most, I see it as advocating for the importance of seeing multiple orientations to be able to see the world from multiple perspectives.
These will never meet except in disagreement, and this thread is just more of that.
The oldest maps in the world and in Europe are oriented North at the top and the essential feature in the middle. For the Babylonians it was the Euphrates and Babylon itself. For the Europeans it was the Mediterranean. The implication that everyone sees up/North as better means that generations of Greek or Roman cartographers just accepted that the barbaric northernmost regions of Europe are "better", which is patently false.
Religions that use the cross as a holy symbol also use the Trinitarian formula (In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, amen) while making the cross. God the Son is the second in the trinity but is put at the bottom of the cross, while God the Holy Spirit is the third yet sits higher. This is also deeply rooted in people's psychology.
So I am not convinced of your argument.
This isn't true, the oldest maps from the Middle Ages were oriented towards the East. (In fact the very word "orient" refers to the East.) The convention of putting north at the top is only a couple of centuries old.
The oldest known world map is the Babylonian Imago Mundi from around the 6th century BCE which has north at the top. Claudius Ptolemy's Geographia also specified north was at the top in 2nd century.
Historically, the prize position on a world map was not the top, but the center.
The oldest European map, of Greek origin, unsurprisingly has the Aegean at the center, and North pointing up.
Creativity historically played a part in drawing maps but the "up on the map is better" philosophy is rejected by the reality of the first documented maps.
>Deciding to put south, or north, at the top of maps is a decision of consequence. Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’ This can influence our interpretation of maps at both global and local scales
I think they are certainly doing a lot of inferring here, but I wouldn't call it "pure projection."
You can change your entire system of reference and the setup still makes sense. Same with the map.
A drinking mug is a large, cylindrical cup with a handle, typically made of earthenware, used to hold hot beverages like coffee or tea. The orientation relative to gravity is fundamental to the functioning of the mug. It is not arbitrary.
I suspect I don't have this thing the article mentions where I associate the bottoms of things with badness, so I don't get this effect where the bad bottom suddenly becomes the good top if I flip it or myself over. There's just no effect except perhaps getting dizzy.
Yes. Changing your system of reference fixes this too. Just get upside down glasses, gravity now goes "up" and the mug is upside down. Works perfectly. You can live like this if you want.
That's not the case with a map. An "upside down" map is just as valid as a right side up map.
The fact that it is upside down is not supposed to mind blowing, it's the fact that it isn't upside down at all. We are just used to it being represented this way up, but there's nothing in the physical world which prescribes north to be up.
Is it as useful and/or efficient though? I could write a phrase in English from right to left and if you really wanted you could read it, but it would be highly inefficient.
An efficient society sometimes has to pick conventions (how to write text, how to print a map, what characters to use, etc) and I find not interesting to point that other conventions could have been used.
Also thinking of maps and Japan: where I am from (Germany) public overview maps of parks or street maps usually have north as up. In Japan however it is very common for those maps to have up as the cardinal direction you are looking at the map at. So if you are looking at the map in a western direction, the map will have west up. So for walking the map is straight up, backwards down, left left and right right.
Like that it is very easy to know which way to go. Want to go to some place that is on the left on the map? Turn left!
To me at least, it feels very wrong to see English written right to left, but I also know it wouldn't be objectively wrong.
Likewise, maps are traditionally "north up" because most of the population lives north of the equator so that's where most maps hailed from and if you're north of the equator having a "north up" map makes celestial navigation slightly easier.
When you take something you're very familiar with and turn it upside down, you see all the details - volume, shape, distance between points, geometric similarity, colour - with fresh eyes. With art, it becomes easier to draw a human figure because it discourages symbol drawing. With a map, I find it helps me realise how close certain points are to each other, how small politically significant regions are, which lattitude different climate bands sit at, and so on.
A mug is a pretty boring object which we're all used to seeing upside down and which doesn't have many interesting features, so of course turning it upside down will not reveal anything interesting.
Can you read upside-down or does it become a jumble of lines? I can read upside-down with no special effort so maybe this is canceling something out.
It's not that I don't see the map from the other side, it's that when it's the right way up I see all the extra information I have about it. For example, I bet an eye tracker would show me focusing on Western Europe, Central Asia, Australia, and the US. When the map is flipped, I see it closer to how it really is because I can ignore those preconceived ideas more easily. I don't see e.g. the Iberian peninsula as represented by a land mass, I see the actual land mass, and can concentrate on its size and distance more easily.
This is really interesting!
I had an HR training session that was intended to help folks see things from other perspectives, but by other perspectives they meant a sort of generic minority perspective ... and a lot of finger wagging.
Nobody enjoyed it. It was all unnecessarily adversarial and represented the shallowest cliches. Nobody thought any of the cliches applied to them about any background because they were so absurd. It was of no use except to make everyone kinda hate HR for wasting their time.
I recall an Obama speech where he noted how telling someone that they have advantages over someone else is not an effective route to influence people. For all you know they think they've had a really hard life ... and maybe they have, you really don't know.
It's the same as logical fallacies: you're not a bad person for falling prey to them, but they ARE something you should be aware of if you're trying to make logical arguments.
I can't see anything in either implying people are bad for seeing world maps as "upside down" when the Southern Hemisphere is at the top. The article does say that looking at it that way "encourages us to think more deeply about such conventions" - I don't think it's saying people are morally bad/prejudiced/etc (or anything) for accepting those conventions.
I don't want to acuse but it seems to me like you're assuming a response from an imagined liberal-woke-type-persona(tm) that doesn't exist?
If you come up with a majority of people telling you "down" is "better associated" with "good", I'll live stream myself on Twitch eating the pair of socks I'm currently wearing.
Also, how typical HN to take something that's absolutely obvious and deny it, just so you can escape the terrible idea that you might be subject to unconscious bias.
It is a considerably stronger yet less-supported statement that these biases fundamentally corrupt your thinking: that you look at Australia and can't help yourself but think it's 10% worse than Greenland.
It is an even stronger and even less-supported statement the world is going to be better off if we stop using certain tainted words or drawing maps in a certain way - i.e., that these biases hurt people and can be excised with one simple linguistic or cartographic trick.
It's a lot easier to interpret these debates as the manifestation of a bad personality trait: the desire to get sanctimonious about how other people are living their lives.
[0] page 907: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/andp.190532...
It gets unconfusing if you realize it just means White.
It definitely does not. Russia, for example, would be considered "White", but is decidedly not part of "the West".
Also the "only in the Northern Hemisphere" part goes out the window as soon as Australia is mentioned.
It doesn't matter that Canada and USA have strong Native populations, "it's different in the south".
In my view the "you're not West" discourse is just another tool to fuck with the souther hemisphere. Fucks you in the head to get this crap from "both sides".
It used to be "West". Now I can't bring it up without getting lectured by people using weird rationalizations, from both sides of the political spectrum.
I'm just fucking tired of the prejudice, that's it.
It doesn't even make sense there. It's not really a logical group of things that are geographically West of anything. The abstract cultural idea of "Western Civilization" or "the West" are poorly named.
Being a product of history, a legacy, is not a shortcut to sensible. It's an explanation for why the term is used. My complaint was that it does not even "make sense" in the context of the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth.
In terms of Latin America being a part of the West or not, that's more interesting. I'm currently reading Samuel P. Huntington's "A Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" and in it he talks a lot about civilizations which he defines as the highest cultural grouping of people short of what makes us human. Language, law, and religion in Latin America largely derive from Europe, although there are other aspects like economics that tend can differ. Some people consider Latin America as part of the West, others believe it's peripheral to the West or its part of its own civilization as Huntington does.
As others have pointed out Russia is not part of the West and at least according to Huntington would be placed in the Orthodox Civilization. Interestingly Huntington also argues that Greece, despite being the center of Classical Civilization which is the bases for Western Civilization, is not a part of the West, rather they too are Orthodox.
Regardless of whether you agree with these groupings, I think distilling it down to skin color is incorrect and not useful. The West itself is not even remotely homogenous in this aspect. You wouldn't go to sections of the Deep South in the US and declare it as not being a part of the West anymore than you would include Belarus as part of the West.
There is a saying in Florida, that the farther North you go, the more South you get.
It hasn't been a directional term for centuries. Everyone intuitively knows this based on the usage but, every now and then, someone like you thinks they are clever and nobody else understands.
Which is wild, cause Americans also love Rome and it's influence in western culture, and Latin America literally speaks languages that are direct descendants of Latin.
Yep. This is the definition I use.
But it makes no sense to use them as topological area boundaries. It's a globe, nothing is "in the west". Things can just be "west of something" which really just is shorthand for "you'll get there faster going west than east".
Plenty of people genuinely believed that if you were to navigate to the West of Europe you would fall off the border of the world (well, some still do).
An outright majority of the world’s population was, and still is, in Asia, so I'm not sure what this split between is supposed to refer to. If you mean Europe was #2 behind Asi, that was true until the 1980s if the Americas are counted as one continent, otherwise the 1990s when Africa took the #2 spot, not “a couple centuries ago”.
What about Africa? North and South America?
> Plenty of people genuinely believed that if you were to navigate to the West of Europe you would fall off the border of the world (well, some still do).
Did they? Who in particular are you referencing here? Are you perhaps falling for the myth of the flat earth[1]?
I’m not sure there is one simple & correct definition of “the West”.
North is not up. That would make left west. When standing in front of a building, with map in hand, and asking people to go start going to the street in the south, then left, I mean left in direction of travel, which is east.
Not left in direction of map conventions, which for people who cannot read a compass is probably west.
In any case, within the reference frame of earth that seems to be a bad definition. Contrary to popular belief, I am pretty sure that Australian's look up at the sky, not down.
Nope. You're confusing up and front.