[patternMachine]

The moralizing that always accompanies (not) upside down maps is so tedious. It's a genuinely interesting example of how something can look so wrong and yet not be wrong at all. To try to extend that "wrong" feeling to some kind of moral failure on the viewers part is just silly. You (or society) are not a bad or prejudiced person for thinking this way, it's just that nearly all maps produced have chosen a different arbitrary orientation.

[vincvinc]

Oh? I think the outrage over making the reader feel like "a bad or prejudiced person" that accompanies any invitation to challenge assumptions is so tedious.

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

[Attrecomet]

"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."

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.

[buran77]

> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’

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.

[antognini]

> The oldest maps in the world and in Europe are oriented North at the top

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.

[Aloisius]

The oldest world maps were drawn long before the Middle Ages.

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.

[buran77]

It wouldn't have killed you to look for something slightly older, seeing how I mentioned Babylon.

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.

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

[taco_emoji]

No, the implication is that "North is up and up is good" is morally bad, and I find it really stupid to disagree with that.

[JadeNB]

> 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.

[jvanderbot]

In this corner, evidence from the last decade of moralizing over minute historical choices ad nauseum, and in this corner, common sense literal readings in good faith.

These will never meet except in disagreement, and this thread is just more of that.

[Forgeties79]

They are probably responding to this:

>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."

[nathan_compton]

Nuclear pun.

[sunrunner]

The Gall of the commenter to exploit such a Goode opportunity.

[j4coh]

I don’t seem to even get this effect, the map looks upside down not mind blowing. If I turn a mug over it’s not a mind blowing new thing, it’s an upside down mug.

[strken]

Steady on now: there's an interesting psychological effect going on. A well known art exercise is to draw a subject upside down, particularly a person or a scene with a clear usual orientation.

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.

[j4coh]

If you're sitting on the opposite side of a table looking at a map that a person on the other side laid out in front of them, you don't just see the map from the other side? You instead see details about volume, shape, distance between points, geometric similarity, colour, and so on? I sincerely just see the same map even if I'm across the table, except flipped. I'm not sure how it would impact my drawing a map, though that isn't really what the article talks about.

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.

[strken]

I can read upside down, but it's an acquired skill. I can't read at a 90 degree angle without difficulty, although I could probably learn to.

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!

[BrandoElFollito]

I agree. In addition I can relate to elements (such as imagining the road from Paris to Munich), it just takes more processing.

[1718627440]

I too have no problems reading upside-down, but for some reason I do find it hard to read sidewards.

[sanderjd]

This is all very interesting, but I'm sorry, personally I just feel the same as the poster you replied to. I don't experience this as anything weird, I just experience it as if I'm looking at a map from the top.

[vasco]

Also probably every single kid that ever played with a map has turn it around a million times, this is a very naive 2deep4u kinda post.

[bonoboTP]

Same when people get their minds blown about the sizes of countries at different latitudes. Feels like I'm the only one who played with a globe as a kid...

[jcattle]

Your analogy is not quite appropriate. An upside down mug is "wrong". The mug looses its meaning and you have to turn it around to use it as a mug.

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.

[vladms]

> An "upside down" map is just as valid as a right side up map.

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.

[jcattle]

I mean, to me at least it is also interesting. Like Japanese writing or Arabic. It's interesting because it is different, there's a different predominant convention. You can also think further about how the writing convention might have had an impact on culture and the society itself.

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!

[542354234235]

In the writing example, something that seems inconsequential like right-to-left or left-to-right, does have real implications. Since most people are right-handed, writing right-to-left means they develop writing styles to keep from smearing the ink. In left-to-right writing, it is unnecessary. The consequence is that the minority left-handed people are just taught a mirror of right-handed writing, making left handedness much more of a burden in a left-to-right writing culture.

[vladms]

Yes, I think there are many interesting things to consider about maps (like projection, orientation maps fixed on a panel/wall, orientation for digital maps). All those discussion will also transmit the basic idea (there is no "good/bad" way) while also discussing other problems ("can't represent area well", "people like different options", "different cases require different orientation").

[CapsAdmin]

Maybe a better analogy would be English and why it's written and read left to right.

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.

[potato3732842]

English (and latin for that matter) is written/read left to right because that is more convenient for the overwhelming majority of the population that is right handed when using easily smudged waxed tablets, wet ink, etc, etc.

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.

[isqueiros]

a mug cannot function when upside down and yet when you change the arbitrary orientation of a map it can still function the same you literally missed the point of the _title_ of the article, quite impressive

[j4coh]

I can turn my hand over and it still functions. I can turn lots of things over that still function. I can even set something on top of my upside-down mug. This is not mind blowing to me, your mileage may vary. I also don't seem to have this association with "the bottom of things is bad" so maybe that's why it doesn't seem so shocking or clever to flip things over.

[dudeinjapan]

ohhh… so thats why my coffee keeps spilling everywhere. I just thought my mug was defective. Hole faces upward: got it. These things really should come with an instruction manual.

[Levitz]

The direction with which you perceive the mug is not any more arbitrary than that of the map, you are just prioritizing the direction gravity takes rather than its opposite, same as magnetism and the north.

You can change your entire system of reference and the setup still makes sense. Same with the map.

[542354234235]

A map is a flat, visual representation of an area, showing its features and locations using symbols and drawings. The system of reference can change, like magnetism and north, and the map still functions as a 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.

[j4coh]

Okay, forget gravity. If you stand on your head and look at the mug, do you get lots of insights about a mug that you wouldn't have had standing upright? Does it look different, or is it just an upside-down mug? For me I would just get the upside-down mug.

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.

[Levitz]

>The orientation relative to gravity is fundamental to the functioning of the mug.

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.

[duxup]

Agreed. The process of finger wagging is counter productive.

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.

[YurgenJurgensen]

It’s also one of those things that gets repeated as a ‘myth’ or ‘misconception’ so often that nowadays, the real misconception is that there is a significant population of literate humans who haven’t encountered this topic at least once.

[dalmo3]

C'mon, let teenagers have some fun.

[stareatgoats]

Well, it's not "wrong" to balk at seeing the world from a different point of view than the convention dictates. What is "wrong" is any insistence that the conventional view is the correct (or "right") one. Moralizing is never a good thing, but it is quite in order to criticize attitudes that equates an upside map to an upside cup, or to evil mindsets, such attitudes are widespread. It's an invitation to accept that our conventions are - conventions, not truths. How "something can look so wrong and yet not be wrong at all" doesn't come naturally, it has to be learned through examples like this.

[beloch]

It is correct to observe that "Up = North" is merely a convention, but there's usually a reason for conventions. e.g. We drive on a particular side of the road because that is a convention enforced by both the law (in most places) and our own desire for self-preservation. Disobeying the conventions of map-making is comparatively safe, unless you're trying to navigate by such a map.

[hans_castorp]

Maps where Europe and Asia are on the left and the Americas are on the right are also quite irritating - but not wrong either.

[taco_emoji]

I mean I think we are all clearly prejudiced, given that our brains just immediately pre-judge such a map as upside-down. Nobody, or at least certainly not the OP, is calling us bad for doing so.

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.

[xigoi]

Following a convention is not prejudice. Conventions are generally a good thing.

[benrutter]

Is the moralizing you're referencing coming from the article or comments?

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?

[Biganon]

Ask 100 random people in the US whether they think "top" is "better associated" with "good" and "down" is "better associated" with "bad", or the other way round. You can even use arrows and randomize the way you ask the question, if you want.

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.

[non_aligned]

I think you're addressing the wrong part of the argument. Of course there are loose associations between concepts that manifest on abstract word-association tasks.

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.

[JuettnerDistrib]

I kinda feel this way about variable names in physics. You could call the (x,y,z) components of the magnetic field (L,M,N), see [0]. There are so many people who call that utterly wrong, but really it's totally fine and merely a source of confusion.

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

[whstl]

As someone from the southern hemisphere, the only thing more patronizing and infuriating than this is the insistence from the same moralizing group that my country isn’t part of “The West”, despite it being physically and culturally there.

[parineum]

"The West" is Western Europe and it's colonial/cultural derivatives.

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.

[greiskul]

A lot of Americans don't consider countries in South America to be part of "The West".

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.

[bonoboTP]

In that conception it's Anglos and the historic roots of Anglo thought. Latin America is a different branch, so it's not on the Anglo branch. But the common root (Rome, Western Europe) is on it. Seems straightforward.

[brabel]

That’s why both Australia and South America were supposed to be integral part of the Western world. Only recently South America has become kind of unwelcome due to its political and economical misalignment.

[watwut]

People on HN regularly argue that Spaniards are not part of the west and it has nothing to do with direction nor culture. It is because a lot of mumbo jumbo that tries to imply but not openly say that they are not white enough.

[whstl]

> "The West" is Western Europe and it's colonial/cultural derivatives.

Yep. This is the definition I use.

[kstrauser]

I think you got their point exactly backwards. Their country is western by the standard you described, but people tell them it’s not because it’s not Western Europe, or the North America.

[zeehio]

Oh shit I wasn't aware that this was the definition. Does this definition then include Philippines being from "The West"?

[cwmoore]

Islands have their own directions.

[vasco]

West and east don't make sense on a globe. It makes a little sense as relative directions to some point.

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".

[blenderob]

Absolutely! On the globe all countries lie to the west of something and simultaneously lie to the east of something.

[mrighele]

Until just a few centuries ago most of the world population was split between Europe (West) and East Asia (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).

[SketchySeaBeast]

> Until just a few centuries ago most of the world population was split between Europe (West) and East Asia (East).

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]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

[dragonwriter]

> Until just a few centuries ago most of the world population was split between Europe (West) and East Asia (East).

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”.

[vbarrielle]

Your parent post meant that a few centuries ago, the american continent was not known, so the known world could be split between east and west.

[travisjungroth]

The West only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere. I’m in Peru right now, and people talk about the local cultures in comparison to Western culture and I find it kind of confusing. They’re certainly not Eastern here.

It gets unconfusing if you realize it just means White.

[adwn]

> 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".

[whstl]

Exactly.

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".

[travisjungroth]

My point is more like Australia is normally considered part of the West, even though it shares longitudes with China and Japan. “The West” and “Western longitudes” really breaks down in the Southern hemisphere. It also breaks down in other ways.

[whstl]

I still don't get the point. I come from a part of South American that is majorly white, and has European culture.

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.

[jack_h]

It's no different than the South in the US which does not include Texas, New Mexica, Arizona, or any other states that are geographically South in the modern day US. Once you understand the historical aspect of the naming it makes sense. The category itself, regardless of its label, is useful.

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.

[542354234235]

>It's no different than the South in the US

There is a saying in Florida, that the farther North you go, the more South you get.

[wang_li]

Geographically "The West" only makes sense in Europe and Asia. Once you expand your scope, compass directions are meaningless and the term "The West" refers to certain philosophies, political, and cultural similarities. And even then, it also refers to a certain time frame.

[opello]

> The West only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere.

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.

[mc32]

It does make sense when you realize it’s a legacy term. Lots of things are legacies from the past.

[opello]

I do realize it's a legacy term. A legacy from the 1500s if not from earlier during the split of the Roman Empire into Greek-East and Latin-West. A legacy that predates Modern English as a language. A legacy the use of which makes no geographic sense with a line at around 22°E Longitude in Europe and then including parts of North America, Australia, and New Zealand all of which would not have been included as having representative cultures at the time of the establishment of the term. But sure, I guess a more descriptive, representative, relevant term isn't something to reasonably call out as nonsense.

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.

[kqr]

I try to say "countries around the northern Atlantic" because that's really what people mean by "West".

[dahfizz]

What about Australia?

I’m not sure there is one simple & correct definition of “the West”.

[voxleone]

I have a feeling you're a fellow Brazilian. Brazil has been Catholic for ages, so leaving it out of the “Western” category is honestly laughable. That said, the map actually gets it right -- it shows Brazil as not Western, but in a way that’s not cringey.

[a3w]

For clarity, you cannot call north up:

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.

[bobbylarrybobby]

North being up doesn't make left west because left is relative to front, not up, and front can easily change directions whereas up cannot (at least not relative to the direction of gravity). It happens that when you're looking at a map mounted on a wall with north up, west is left, but if you were to turn 90° left yourself, then west would be straight (front). This is all consistent with north being up.

[matrss]

But if you define "up" as the direction opposite to where gravity pulls things (which very much makes sense) then there is no possible situation in which north being up would be correct either. A compass needle never points up. You are mounting a map of something horizontal onto a vertical surface, it is just as correct - or depending on the alignment of the wall arguably even more correct - to put east up. You can only ever get at most two directions correct, after all.

[ndriscoll]

Obviously "up" is the direction of of the normal vector for Earth's orbit around the Sun. North is then tilted but mostly up.

[matrss]

/s, right? Since the path of earth's orbit around the sun lies on a plane your decision to make the normal vector point in the same general direction of "north" seems arbitrary too. You could just as well call the negative of that the normal vector, and then south would be mostly up instead.

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.

[ndriscoll]

Mostly sarcasm (you already get North from Earth's rotation on its axis and don't need the Sun), but fixing "up" on a map (so that it doesn't rotate as you move around) makes sense, and agreeing with general mathematical convention is convenient so that we don't need to teach more exceptions. If we're going to flip the sign of something it should be electric charge.

[miki_oomiri]

> North is not up. That would make left west.

Nope. You're confusing up and front.