gwern comments on The Emergence of Math - Less Wrong
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Try sailing an ocean, as millions of humans have had to do (even just the ones doing so involuntarily like the Africa->America slave trade) with plain Euclidean geometry and then tell me how practical alternative forms of mapmaking, direction-setting, and locations are.
As it happens, Nick Szabo is slowly blogging how exactly one does that: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2012/10/dead-reckoning-and-exploration-explosion.html and http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2012/10/dead-reckoning-maps-and-errors.html
Just because many millions of people don't need to concern themselves with that doesn't mean there aren't many other millions who don't.