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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

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.

a3w 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        /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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
  > North is not up. That would make left west. Nope. You're confusing up and front.
whstl 1y ago
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.
- travisjungroth 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
JuettnerDistrib 1y ago
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.19053221004 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/andp.190532...
YurgenJurgensen 1y ago
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 1y ago
  C'mon, let teenagers have some fun.
j4coh 1y ago
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.
- vasco 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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...
- isqueiros 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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.
vincvinc 1y ago
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 1y ago
  "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.
  - JadeNB 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      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.
  - ashoeafoot 1y ago
    [dead]
  - buran77 1y ago
stareatgoats 1y ago
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.
benrutter 1y ago
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?
taco_emoji 1y ago
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 1y ago
  Following a convention is not prejudice. Conventions are generally a good thing.
hans_castorp 1y ago
Maps where Europe and Asia are on the left and the Americas are on the right are also quite irritating - but not wrong either.
Biganon 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
duxup 1y ago
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.
beloch 1y ago
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.

a3w 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      /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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
> North is not up. That would make left west. Nope. You're confusing up and front.

whstl 1y ago

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.

travisjungroth 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago

JuettnerDistrib 1y ago

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.19053221004 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/andp.190532...

YurgenJurgensen 1y ago

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 1y ago
C'mon, let teenagers have some fun.

j4coh 1y ago

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.

vasco 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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...
isqueiros 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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.

vincvinc 1y ago

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 1y ago
"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.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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.
- ashoeafoot 1y ago
  [dead]
- buran77 1y ago

stareatgoats 1y ago

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.

benrutter 1y ago

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?

taco_emoji 1y ago

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 1y ago
Following a convention is not prejudice. Conventions are generally a good thing.

hans_castorp 1y ago

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

Biganon 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.

duxup 1y ago

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.

beloch 1y ago

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.