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awfullotofocelots t1_jefm20k wrote

Reply to comment by Fellowes321 in There really isn't any reason why north is always upward and south is always downward on maps. by GuinnessTheBestBoi

There is also a geographic reason. It's just not the sole reason. The Earth's poles and its rotation around its axis is the reason that pretty much everyone prefers a map with poles oriented vertically. If not for our rotation around our axis making the sun appear to move east west, we mightve preferred something different. From there we had it narrowed it down to two options (either south = up or north = up), and the one that stuck was the one that the people in power preferred at the time the convention became standardized.

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michalsrb t1_jefqslk wrote

And since most land and therefore population is on Northern hemisphere, it was likely that whoever is in power will be there. And after all, it was a good choice as it's natural orientation for most people.

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ringobob t1_jeg47mg wrote

I wonder if it's a personality thing, given a blank piece of paper and your own deduced position, if you would naturally place yourself on the upper half or the lower half.

I think if it was me, I'd probably place myself on the lower half, with the intention of climbing upward to explore, rather than delving lower to explore. Maybe that's because I'm not an explorer, and see possibilities in the sky, and inhospitabilities below.

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michalsrb t1_jegbdv3 wrote

I think the actual answer is that you put yourself in the middle and then as you explore all around you you expand the map. So at the beginning you may choose South/North arbitrarily just based on the local features. Then as you explore you find out whether you are on top or bottom of the expanded map.

TBH this is one of the things someone knows the true answer and I could just Google it, but it's fun to speculate.

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Muroid t1_jefw3tl wrote

You’re already assuming an “axis = vertical” model in that justification.

There’s no particular reason to think that the sun moving East-West means that East-West has to be side to side.

Maybe the sun is falling from “up” to “down” and the poles are the sides of the Earth.

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morry32 t1_jefy6hx wrote

its that kind of thinking that sunk the crown

​

/s

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ringobob t1_jeg51ij wrote

There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but there's an inherent natural inclination to see up/down as fixed and side/side as variable (seeing as that's where we do and don't have total freedom of movement) and using the (more or less) fixed poles as the fixed point makes a sort of sense that would arise naturally, I think.

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awfullotofocelots t1_jegdl1w wrote

I'm not assuming anything: I have a modern understanding of the Earths relationship to the sun. Past humans collectively did assume based on their observations and measurements of the sun (see ancient structures marking the solstice or equinox), but it would be ignorant to discount that those early assumptions led to the modern conventions we use.

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Muroid t1_jegef9x wrote

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.

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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.

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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.

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