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.

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

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.

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.

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?

[0] page 907: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/andp.190532...

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.

> 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.

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

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.

Up-and-coming.

Top-of-the-line.

I could go on, but I don't want to get you down.

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...

1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/194855061140104...

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/cadent/t...

:)

Your map should be bottom-heavy for stability.

Its all arbitrary, and we can all make up random minor pro/cons all we like but it don’t change that.

And BTW, in the old towns of Sweden and Finland blocks do have names!

If it was so offensive, both India and China would not be at loggerheads trying to posture themselves as a leader of the Global South.

Simple fact of the matter is that progress in modern world requires networked systems. Europeans and Euro-descendants were able to achieve this networking through racial bonhomie and colonialism. Non-western countries do not have that available to them, so they have to invent new narratives to facilitate that networking.

The fact that India may have orbital launch and Australia doesn't is the reason to reject Developing/Developed dichotomy and move to a different one, Global North/South seems to be the one gaining traction.

Getting offended over the existence of the idea of Global South just because it doesn't hew closely to some arbitrary parameter is similar to saying that G7 is natural but BRICS is dangerous. It's just a statement of rote comfort. If Australia is not a northern country by direction, it's not a western country by direction either; I doubt any Australians are in a hurry to classify themselves as an Eastern society and not a Western one.

There is nothing "arbitrary" about the classification, and it was created by aid groups originally based upon socioeconomic factors, later adopted by the UN and others as the term third-world went out of favour after the Cold War ended. It got the North/South bifurcation purely because most of the one set were Northern countries, and most of the other set were Southern countries, and most people don't have a defensiveness about the words North or South and aren't offended by it.

As an aside, acting as if the colonial countries aren't empirically successful because you want to push some umbrage is just super weird. Australia and New Zealand are both highly developed rich countries, regardless of whatever your rural area's infrastructure is like.

Countries in the Global South desperately want to be classified in that grouping because it means development funds and benefits that aren't available to Global North countries. China has rapidly risen over the past couple of decades and it's getting hard to still call it a developing country (and its foreign aid intake has been rapidly tapering off as it industrializes), though to be fair, it still has a GDP per capita 1/4 Australia or New Zealand. Similarly Russia is mighty close to losing Global North standing.

And for that matter South Korea and Japan are a part of the Global North. I guess they didn't get your memo that it's only for the white countries or some such social justice prattle.

And once I get to your final paragraph I'm firmly convinced you were just trolling, or at least I honestly hope you were. Delineating the world by socioeconomic conditions doesn't denote allies or enemies, and this bizarre take is nonsensical and has zero relevance to anything but some contrived taking of offense. The mere notion that it is "arbitrary" is so fantastically ridiculous that you have to be having a laugh.

But it's not worse than what we were using before, and it's not completely arbitrary either. It's frequently useful to group countries in this way, people seem to really want to do it regardless, there's going to be names for this idea.

https://m.xkcd.com/503/

It just needs to me moved not rotated if it's horizontal though, those are not so uncommon either as physical/tactile minature models or maps on podestals, tables or on the floor even in europe.

Einnorden used to be quite a thing with paper maps in the field.

The term Orientation even goes back further referencing to the era of T and O maps in occidental Europe where east was up and where the sun rises and also of significance to Christianity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map

Then again nobody seems to notice the Manhattan grid is actually not north up.

Printing press and maps really started following the sailors and navigators knowledge and needs, where previously it was often religious or political (east at top facing jerusalem or 'oriented')

Even more literally "of the rising" ("occidental" meaning "of the falling"). The sun is of course implied here, but the Latin verbs orior and occido more generally indicate rising and falling motions of anyone and anything.

In Europe. And probably even only far from the Mediterranean.

Effective scene, too -- I've thought a bit differently about maps and some other things ever since, things that might not have ever occurred to me before. It's not a bad idea to expose people to different map projections / configurations to shake up their view of the world.

I'd be interested to see if handedness in those countries is different.

https://i2.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/...

The fact of the matter is that any data visualization brings with it some advantages and drawbacks. This can be projection, orientation or centering related. Acknowledging these drawbacks can be useful, and so is trying out alternative representations of the data every so often.

One thing I think can be acknowledged is that the poor job traditional maps do of representing Africa has affected policy towards countries in the continent for the worse. For instance misguided infrastructure projects.

Nope, just convention from the places that held cultural hegemony when our current map-making conventions were established.

It is a novel (I would say amazing) map projection that manages to retain proportional landmass size by using an "ioso-area-mapping" technique. It maps the sphere to a tetrahedron and then slices and unfolds that tetrahedron into a 2d plane.

The method places all of the continents into the map (proportionally!), while also being able to tessellate (so you can move the "viewfinder" to focus on different map subsections without changing the overall map). It's easier to see than describe. The "4" link is an example of modifying the "view" of the tessellated surface to create maps that focus on particular regions.

The downside is that "north" and "south" are rather arbitrary points on the map, instead of being at the top/bottom.

It is still by far my favorite 2D map projection!

For a list of alternative projections

And also this one for a whole deep dive in the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection

People have gotten very creative about the topic .. also.. the UN actually uses a north-centered view of the world to compromise on this.. it’s really cool

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Sm...

It's long been practice for maps to be centered on the country/continent they're produced in. American world maps centered on the Americas, British world maps centered on Greenwich, Chinese world maps centered on East Asia.

These days we've mostly standardized on the more "neutral" choice of having the edges in the middle of the Pacific because that minimizes the land getting split up, but there are also Asian maps that split in the middle of the Atlantic, since Greenland's population is low.

Would be interesting to see a world map designed with latitude vertically instead. If the top were the Pacific, your eyes would first appraise East Asia. If the top were the Atlantic, North America.

(Apple Maps won't work here because it uses a globe.)

I think it is more likely you are being sarcastic or trolling than that you really would not have known. But I am not sure. (I don't know anything about you but this one comment.)

So the conventional association between Upward and Northward is very much grounded in physical reality (for dwellers in the northern hemisphere).

Panel 1: But Libertad¹, you’re hanging it upside down.

Panel 2: Upside down in relation to what? Earth is in space, and space has neither up nor down.

Panel 3: Saying the northern hemisphere is up is a psychological trick from those at the top, so that those who believe we are below continue to believe we are at the bottom. And the worst part is that if we keep believing we’re below, we’ll continue to be. But starting today, that’s over!

Panel 4, top: Where were you, Mafalda?

Panel 4, bottom: I don’t know, but something just came to an end.

¹ It’s her name: https://mafalda.fandom.com/es/wiki/Libertad

I believe you should be able to get it shipped wherever. https://www.mapcenter.com/store/p/upside-down-world-by-rober...

Also the North Star being a thing is quite influential.

Also, where the sun rises and sets varies enormously over the year. Using the sun to determine north (e.g. shadow-stick method) is more reliable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_meridian

Yes. This is a consequence of the fact that the "land in the north" is, on average, further north (of the Equator) than the "land in the south" is south (of the Equator).

The southernmost point on the South American mainland, per Wikipedia, is Cape Froward, Chile, at about 54°S. For perspective, some cities between 53°N and 54°N include Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Hamburg, Germany; and Dublin, Ireland. Similarly, the capital of New Zealand is about in line with the capital of Albania, and the capital of South Africa is about in line with the capital of Qatar.