Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Muroid t1_jegef9x wrote

Reply to comment by awfullotofocelots in There really isn't any reason why north is always upward and south is always downward on maps. by GuinnessTheBestBoi

Yeah, but the orientation is still arbitrary. There’s nothing natural about associating the poles with up and down or the precession of the sun through the sky as side to side motion.

It’s purely an arbitrary convention that could easily be reversed with no impact on how any of it is observed now or in the past.

0

awfullotofocelots t1_jegewap wrote

Obviously it's arbitrary. The fact that it's arbitrary doesn't change the fact that we came to it through our model for the world and our reasoning. Even if that reasoning was based on assumptions that ended up invalid.

Lots of choices society makes are arbitrary. Red and green traffic signals, using commas for pauses and periods for stops, using these particular 26 shapes as an alphabet... but just because we make arbitrary collective choices that could have gone a different way, doesn't mean there wasn't a reason for the choice at the time we made it.

1

Muroid t1_jegfxuj wrote

You’re the one who said there was a geographic reason for it.

There’s no geographic reason for poles to be oriented vertically.

You’ve essentially just said “There’s a reason that we orient our maps so that North is up. It’s because that’s where the North Pole is and we orient our maps vertically based on the poles.”

Ok great, except that that doesn’t actually answer the question, because if you then ask “why do we orient our maps based on the poles” which is kind of implicit in the initial question, the answer is “No particularly good reason except that that’s how we do it.”

Edit: Sure, there are always reasons why an arbitrary choice went one way or the other. But you didn’t actually give the reason in this case. You’ve just asserted that there was one.

0