Yes, I changed the title to the linked page to ‘A path from Seattle’ from ‘Go east from Seattle’ because, from reading the comments here, I agree the original title was too misleading. Just updated the title of the Substack post also.
Author here — I agree the image is misleading (and added a caveat to be clearer, though I could have made the arrow smaller).
I don't think the question requires the reader to ignore what ‘east’ means, however. There is unambiguously one direction at Seattle (tangent to the Earth's surface) which is facing due east.
I also didn't mean to take a patronising/arrogant tone to the reader and I'm sorry if that was the impression I gave.
I read it after your caveat was added, but I didn't find it intentionally misleading, from the very strong response (which is doing what it accuses the post of doing by claiming it reads 'travel due east') I get the feeling someone may be a bit peeved they didn't 'get it's and instead thought the answer would be some embassy that happens to be directly east of Seattle.
> There is unambiguously one direction at Seattle (tangent to the Earth's surface)
and that tangent is the straight line, at least it is within the R^3 spatial universe I live within.
There's confusion here as the article presumes humans to be bound to an S^2 manifold and to consider a Great Circle to be a "straight line" which it certainly is not unless one lives within an S^2 Flatland.
A classic! Seems obviously wrong (see Udo's comment), but nobody can quite seem to agree exactly what goes wrong. Probably Lewis' responses are best – https://philpapers.org/rec/LEWLAM-2
