Recent comments in /f/Showerthoughts

awfullotofocelots t1_jegewap wrote

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

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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CalEPygous t1_jegenk6 wrote

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

You realize your comments make no sense. That the prime meridian is at zero in Greenwich England is a sociological/historical fact. That north is on top makes sense based upon the geographic fact that most of the landmass of the earth is north of the equator. Therefore the names on the maps would be read (as one reads a book) from top to bottom. These latter two facts have nothing to do with the UK or anything other than geographic facts and common sense.

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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.

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Quantum-Connection t1_jegeayf wrote

Reply to 99% of humans are decent and empathetic, don't sweat the 1% by itkplatypus

Even if your bar for being "decent" and "empathetic" means not murdering, raping, or regularly doing other horrible physical or psychological things to another person (which is an incredibly low bar) these percentiles aren't even remotely accurate.

What you really mean is 99% of people treat the people close to them with the bare minimum of decency and empathy and don't actively harm them. Even that probably isn't true. Also that is in a place where being decent is easy.

If you want to know what people are like by default just remember, in Rwanda the Hutus killed 800,000 Tutsis with machetes in 100 days, probably hundreds of thousands of people participated in genocide directly because some men on the radio told them to. That was 30 years ago. Or remember everyone in Germany played stupid when the Russians and Americans found the camps, they all knew. That was only like 80 years ago.

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awfullotofocelots t1_jegdl1w wrote

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

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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