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It's beneficial in that it lets you score points in theoretical arguments on the internet. In practice it doesn't matter. For example, the floor of my bathroom

by bregma 6y ago

It's beneficial in that it lets you score points in theoretical arguments on the internet. In practice it doesn't matter. For example, the floor of my bathroom is ten feet wide. I recently had to replace it, which in practice meant I had to cut a plank 9 feet 11.5 inches on one side and 10 feet 0.25 inches on the other side. It seems that the original carpenter, when dividing his plank by 3, eyeballed it it more or less so it looked right and just sort of waved their saw in the general direction of correct. It turns out that in reality, the actual arbitrary units are irrelevant. But you know, bikeshedding on which arbitrary system of units is best is a pretty effective way to procrastinate finishing off that bathroom renovation.

stephen_g 6y ago
Yeah, this kind of thing annoys me to no end when I scroll through these kind of debates in comment threads. I wonder if people who pose these hypotheticals about dividing lengths down would be surprised that tradesmen and carpenters in the rest of the world get on just fine, and don’t need a maths degree to work this kind of thing out! A lot of the arguments though (and some of the most impassioned) mostly boil down to “I’m more familiar with this system so I assume it’s better” - for example, any time that people say that customary units are “more human scales” or “fractions are easier to understand than decimals” whatever. It actually makes basically no difference in practice, it’s just that growing up with one system or the other makes you a lot more familiar with it!
- capableweb 6y ago
  > makes you a lot more familiar with it Essentially boiling down to the famous "easy vs simple" where something is "easy" if you're familiar with it and can draw conclusions via leveraging existing experience and "simple" is that it's maybe not familiar, but easier to become familiar with because it's not complex. Blatantly stolen from Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

by bregma 6y ago

stephen_g 6y ago

Yeah, this kind of thing annoys me to no end when I scroll through these kind of debates in comment threads. I wonder if people who pose these hypotheticals about dividing lengths down would be surprised that tradesmen and carpenters in the rest of the world get on just fine, and don’t need a maths degree to work this kind of thing out! A lot of the arguments though (and some of the most impassioned) mostly boil down to “I’m more familiar with this system so I assume it’s better” - for example, any time that people say that customary units are “more human scales” or “fractions are easier to understand than decimals” whatever. It actually makes basically no difference in practice, it’s just that growing up with one system or the other makes you a lot more familiar with it!

capableweb 6y ago
> makes you a lot more familiar with it Essentially boiling down to the famous "easy vs simple" where something is "easy" if you're familiar with it and can draw conclusions via leveraging existing experience and "simple" is that it's maybe not familiar, but easier to become familiar with because it's not complex. Blatantly stolen from Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/