What about green chalkboards and multi colored whiteboard markers?

We're deep in contrivance at this point.

That people will have fewer cases of lung cancer.

There are a lot of people who prefer to fight from guard.

Yes, I did a horrible thing and made a joke.

There’s an outdated rule in English that states you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. It dates back to a time when writers applied Latin’s grammatical rules to English. It’s mostly ignored now.

It certainly disproves that it's a pattern without exceptions, and therefore invalidates or at least questions the idea that every instance of up and down (like which way up north is) has to be mapped to good and bad.

It's all just anecdotes vs. anecdotes. The alleged "broader pattern" is not proven by one any more than it is disproven by the other. (For what it's worth, I do think there is a cultural pattern, especially in biblical metaphors, but in general use it's far weaker than what TFA is making it out to be.)

Nope just an American old enough to remember real physical paper maps. You don't put the most important part on the edge. (I believe the Chinese also use "central" to describe the leader or foremost member of a group though. It's fascinating to think about how language might unconsciously influence behavior)

First World were countries aligned with the United States, Second World were countries aligned with the Soviet Union, and Third World were countries who were "neutral" or not aligned with either major superpower. Many Third World countries were newly independent, and were economically struggling but also wanted to assert sovereignty. Many were given aid packages to attempt to court them to one side or the other. The terms are outdated because of reality, not because of "progressives".

We didn't, though! At least, not for that purpose. When India's PM Nehru said to the UN, "We are the third world," it was a profound statement that had absolutely nothing to do with economics. "Developing" and "developed" were introduced to the public conscious as a desperate attempt to stop the ignorant masses (including, at one point, me) from ruining a useful descriptor.

I haven't read the link you posted because I want to expand on my initial reaction.

A layman who is not familiar with the reasons behind Global North/South would not think about imperialist relations. I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.

Global North/South makes no sense at all, again from a layman's perspective. From the original story:

> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’

When I see Australia in the southern hemisphere being characterised as "North", I think that the creator of this term is discriminating against countries they consider inferior. There is no room for growth here. A country being characterised as "South" will always be as such, because intuitively we know we can't switch geographies.

As an Australian, I do find it a bit perjorative for countries north of us (many of them in the northern hemisphere!) to be deemed the "global south", while we are excluded despite actually being the only inhabited continent entirely in the south. It just reminds one that nobody cares about the southern hemisphere, and that northern hemisphere types think anything south of the mediterranean is "south".

North/South doesn't have anything to do with it, anyway, as you alluded to. What people actually want to talk about is whether a country is a former colonial master, a former settler colony or a former extractive colony (or possibly multiple of these, as with e.g. the US).

> What are "developing" countries developing into? Nice white western ones like the global north? Nope. That one is the worst of the choices.

The way to think about it is along economic, social, and infra/tech dimensions, and are not coupled to culture or ethnicity (your "white western").

Specifically, developing countries:

- Economic: low income, underdeveloped industry

- Social: lower quality of life, limited access to basic services (jobs, food, clean water, education, healthcare, housing)

- Infra/tech: poor infrastructure, limited access to technology

Furthermore, the following countries in Europe ("white") can be considered developing: Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. while Japan is not developing (and not "white western").

Some countries have a high HDI (e.g. in Africa you can think of Algeria, Egypt, South Africa, Morocco, Botswana, etc.) but can still be considered developing on other dimensions.

In the Middle East, counties like Qatar, UAE, Israel, Kuwait, and Bahrain can be considered developed (and not "white western").

I said "somewhat okay" in my original comment to mean developing/developed classification is better than the Global North/South. Not that it's good or should be widely used. I wanted to communicate that even that bad classification is "better" than Global North/South which I'm hearing about today for the first time.

They are "developing" into industrialized countries.

They’re becoming developed like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.

"Economically developed" doesn't imply race: you are the one bringing white up... Or perhaps you are projecting your bad impressions onto others?

Developing is a fine word, with little taint.

You remind me of a lady who objected to me saying "retarded" who then righteously lectured me about not saying retarded, and she proceeded to give an example of her having a friend in a wheelchair as to why the word was offensive. I couldn't even start to tell her just how grossly disgusting her comments were.

Parts of reality suck, but denying reality sucks even harder - especially if you think you are helping less developed peoples.

Do you live in a white western country?

If so, do you have a plan for emigrating?

If you've no plan, why not?

Only because their population is so huge. Their Dollar GDP is about 2/3 that of the USA and is 4.5x that of Japan. In a sense it’s set of highly developed urban industrial zones that also has a massive underdeveloped rural area.

Extending that, heads have a much easier time moving left and right than up and down, since the motion uses the pivot joints. So, that means rastering left to right, then top to bottom, is the best match to the average reading and writing human (since right handedness is the dominant genetic trait [1]).

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37423-8

Top to bottom advantages everyone. Left to right advantages the right-handed. Right handed being the majority, top to bottom and left to right wins in almost every writing system.

And why would that make the top better than the bottom anyway? That's like saying the meal is worse after you finish it.

I don't think "natural" is used metaphorically. If you had an accurate simulation of the human hand you could show that one of the directions minimizes energy usage and damage to your hand, and I think it's the one we use. Starting high means gravity is helping you move down the page, and it's also easier to move your hand towards you than away from you, and the many small movements (rather than the one big one to the top of the next page) are where more energy is spent because of friction.

Writing is done by people and people are almost always subject to gravity. It's one of the 4 fundamental forces. Energy minimization is not an arbitrary selection criteria, it's central to the fitness/design of all living things.

I don't think it takes knowledge of gravity/energy/entropy to generalize that things more naturally "fall down" rather things naturally "rise up". But, it's probably a stretch to say that influenced writing direction.

Others have made a possibly more relevant point - in one direction, your arm/hand will block what you have already written.

yes and we daily see plants growing upward rapidly like 9.8 m/s²... maybe vapour and smoke going up are which we experience collectively as upward going things, but those are quite rare compared to like everything which falls to the ground.

yeah it's remarkable how many comments in this thread seem to be grasping onto random facts as if they represent a non-arbitrary justification.

is this a contrarian impulse or an anti-contrarian impulse?

I don't know the distribution of people using left or right across the world and how it is determined. It might be even close to 50% everywhere in early infancy, but once one "main direction" emerged at society level (by luck - like there were 4 people writing in that direction versus 2 in the other), maybe everybody is "pushed" in that direction.

Anyhow it's a matter of trade-offs and each society ended up with different ones - I mean direction I find least controversial, think of Chinese and Ancient Egyptian scripts that are logographic - why did they end up with that?

We can also analyze if some convention makes sense or not and why, even if the initial decision was taken for the "wrong" (or some irrational) reasons (ex: the village priest heard a voice).