> I think you should be more amazed at people who _don’t_ care at _all _ about size. Sure, this group might include reasonable people like yourself who are knowledgeable about map distortions and trade offs. But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group.
On what are you basing it?
IME, almost nobody cares. Even folks who like maps (e.g. me) "don't care" in most cases, because flat maps will have distortions.
AFAICT, the people who really care about these distortions are folks who have political agendas and like to sling ad hominems around, such as "Folks who don't care are morons or racists."
So again:
> But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group.
I was basing it off of “IME” and “AFAICT” similar to what you just did in your own ad hominem attack ironically. I don’t tend to preface things like that when commenting and usually I assume this when reading comments online. I used to write “anecdotally” but it’s 2023.
On Quora, there’s a “group” sort of like a subreddit titled “It’s OK to be White”. There’s about 35k people who follow it. Their mission is to “uplift White cultures and oppose anti-White racism”.
Like I already said in my previous comment (so you didn’t need to ask twice what I was basing it off of), people often post map distortion memes on Quora and these other people from that group come out of the woodworks to complain. These memes aren’t even posted in that group. And I wish I could say that it’s just these weirdos on Quora that act like this. But no. I’ve seen it on Instagram. On Facebook. I’ve heard it in real life. It’s a thing that bothers a certain demographic of people. While it’s not a “major” thing and shouldn’t matter, it’s still a thing that I tend to see often.
I see there’s miscommunication here though. I do agree with you that most people “don’t care”. That’s the phrase we have been using. What you are saying and what I also believe is that most people are “map agnostic” for lack of a better phrase. They don’t care in that sense. Like life is too short. It’s just a map.
But when I used the phrase “don’t care” and added underscores around it and the words “at all” in my comments yesterday, I was referring to people who have _strong_ and _negative_ opinions about not caring.
For example, OP said that he was _constantly amazed_. And the other language he used evoked that he was “flabbergasted” that people care about map distortions. (Do you see how this is a different definition of “don’t care”?)
The language he was using and the emotions involved “mirrored” the language and emotions that I see on Quora and hear in real life from that specific group of people.
You’re right. I don’t have any concrete data or surveys or experiments or a sentiment analysis to show that those groups overlap. I was just basing it off of being alive for 30+ years, living in different countries, having a brain, etc.
(Also, there’s nothing wrong with calling someone a moron and/or a racist lol. The two groups usually overlap. Oops I did it again!)
On what are you basing it?
IME, almost nobody cares. Even folks who like maps (e.g. me) "don't care" in most cases, because flat maps will have distortions.
AFAICT, the people who really care about these distortions are folks who have political agendas and like to sling ad hominems around, such as "Folks who don't care are morons or racists."
So again:
> But a lot of the “I don’t care” group overlaps with the “Africa is a country” group.
On what are you basing that?