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by prepend 1096 days ago
Why is it important that poor people live near the equator? I expect that a large part of the population is aware of this fact.

So bringing it up doesn’t contribute to the article and is a bit off in the article. Why not mention that the days are longer in the summer away from the equator. Or they people near the equator have darker pigment. Or many other true but irrelevant facts.
2 comments
XorNot 1096 days ago
Because the equator in the Mercator projection is the closest to "true size"...which means that the wealthier nations, well above that, are in fact exacerbated in apparent land mass.

I like this site[1] for showing the true size of countries on a standard projection. Look at how much the US actually changes in size when you move it's latitude even a little.

Like it or not, the perception of scale of a problem is linked to apparent size - Africa looks smaller then it is, whereas the European countries look a lot larger then they are. When we talk about a problem affecting somewhere, the idea that "most of the world is experiencing it" is contraindicated by our maps even if only subconsciously.

[1] https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc0MzY1MDE.NTAzNDg...

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kortilla 1096 days ago
Nobody looks at a map before saying “most of the world is experiencing X”. This is a fantasy straw man.
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InSteady 1096 days ago
No one claimed people do this. You have created a straw man-ception. Our awareness of the world is informed by distorted maps, even if it only impacts us subconsciously.
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kortilla 1096 days ago
No it’s not. Nobody cares about Greenland despite it being larger than all of Europe on the projection.
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darkwater 1096 days ago
Well I actually used to think - before being educated about map constraints and the Mercator projection - that "Wow Greenland is HUGE".
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kortilla 1095 days ago
How old were you when you learned that though? I thought the same thing until we were shown why it’s misleading in like the 4th grade.
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nerdbert 1095 days ago
Obviously not. And nobody said that. Talk about straw men.

People have internalized a sense of the relative sizes of different countries, and that internal representation is what they refer to.

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tbrownaw 1096 days ago
The obvious implication made by mentioning it is that it's somehow connected.

Maybe the future article will try to claim that we like Mercator because it matches apparent size to importance.

Maybe it'll try to claim that wealth differences are caused by different apparent size.

With the current fashion being to see all inequalities as imposed by force, the later seems more likely.

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... And since the date on the post is a couple months ago, I looked for that follow up and it was two days later but mostly paywalled: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/are-maps-decei...

The blurb at least sounds like it is indeed exploring that second option, but the meat of whatever argument and conclusion isn't public.

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