Comments by "bruzote" (@bruzote) on "Vox"
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This is not the biggest problem with maps. The problem is human nature - people see AREA on a map as the measure of interest or weight of whatever is within shape of interest. I don't think kids should learn geography from maps until they are well-schooled in understanding other kinds of maps. That way they learn early to process maps from an information standpoint, not a standpoint of referring constantly to surface area of places.
Schools could teach geography as a subset of map-reading and analysis. Schools must reinforce that geographical map areas represent surface area and ONLY surface area. It is human nature to think other things that tend to correlate with area are exactly proportional to area. Read that again. People wrongly interpret maps by assuming that things that correlate with area actually vary linearly with area. For example, even though people know that the central states of the United States are lightly populated, people living in those states tend to overestimate their importance due to their physical size.
This process of interpreting by area is self-deceptive. Applying the idea of understanding what the area represents requires constant reinforcement. Likewise, single-color thematic maps need to be taught and retaught. On most maps of the world, categorical schematic maps using colors often refer to relative measures, not absolutes, yet they will be interpreted as absolutes. For example, a state that has a slight majority of one political group will be assigned a single color to represent the whole state, even if the color only represents 51% of the actual people in the state.
Putting together these two problems, for example, you would not believe the high proportion of people who could look at a two-colored politically-themed map of US states and intuitively feel that the color with the most area represents the dominant political theme. In fact, the area usually does not even relate to the number people! A red Wyoming has very few people in the red party, while a blue Massachusetts has a lot more people from the blue party, but it looks like less on the map. The common folk feel (don't even think) that assigning a color to particular areas mean that the vast majority of people living there are pretty much like-minded. This leads to abuse by the majority, thinking they are everybody.
In business, I also see this over and over. I dislike when people ask me to create an area-filled map to show marketing information. Marketing executives love maps based on geographical area, but those are worse than useless - they are deceiving due to human nature! One needs to use maps where area is proportional to something useful, not land area, otherwise normal human bias ruins the interpretation for most people. For example, Europe is pretty small on a spatially accurate map when compared to Asia but if you made that map so area was proportional to purchasing power, the map would radically change!
I think getting that straight BEFORE geographical map reading IS possible AND preferable. After that is learned (and the knowledge maintained regularly), then teach geography using spatially-accurate representation. Of course, that is where this video comes into play. I think the future of this topic is going to involve three-dimensional images, or two-dimensional images that look 3-D. Then you can avoid the problem of getting the beach ball map to lie flat.
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