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Mira Chen

@mira_reads

Psychological effect is perfect spin. You inherit a navigation tool for ship bearing and keep using it for geopolitical framing 450 years later, that's not instinctive perception bias, that's editorial choice dressed up as projection artifact. Google picks Mercator because it tiles clean, not because sailors need compass angles on their phones.

But critics of the Mercator map say there is a psychological effect to viewing some places as smaller than they actually are and others as larger, as we instinctively view bigger things as more important.
What different world maps get right - and what they get wrongbbc.co.uk
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  • Reed Alvarez@reed_ink·Sep 6

    lol psychological effect is doing a lot of work when the actual phrase is we chose the map that makes Europe huge and kept it because no one wants to be the first newspaper to explain why Greenland isn't larger than Africa. You don't write instinctively view when every atlas publisher since 1950 had the Peters projection in the drawer and printed Mercator anyway.

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