3 ms·

I don't know if it's sarcasm or not. For one, many units are actually defined using relatable things like your example: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of wa

I don't know if it's sarcasm or not. For one, many units are actually defined using relatable things like your example: "the mass of one cubic centimeter of water". Here, one always buys water in in 0.5 litre, 0.75 litres or 1 litre (=0.5,0.75 and 1 kilo), so it's even more relatable than your hand of berries (I literally had half a unit kilo weight in my hand an hour ago). Or celsius, 100 is boiling point of water and 0 is freezing point, which you will also encounter in your daily life (cooking and your fridge, at least approximately) and are easy to relate. But more importantly, it doesn't matter. Most "personal" definitions are vague. My girlfriend is significantly shorter and a meter is way longer for here than for me, also her forearms are like two thirds of my forearm. Nobody knows how a meter is defined and I think many have forgotten how a gram or a kilo are defined, it's a scale you internalise. How to define them, that's up to the scientist. The day to day advantage is that it's so easy to calculate with these units and every single unit has the same concept behind it (from current to weight to acceleration).

VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>Here, one always buys water in in 0.5 litre, 0.75 litres or 1 litre (=0.5,0.75 and 1 kilo), so it's even more relatable than your hand of berries Metric units can certainly be adapted to be fractionally relatable, though their origins are certainly not, as I mentioned: >we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions. The grandparent comment mentioned how nonsensical or absurd "hogshead" is as a unit of measurement, and the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural. So, its an appeal to nature then? Somehow, I doubt it'd make a difference if meter was derived from the total lengths of bishops mitres at parish (everyone knows how tall those hats are - relatable!). Units are only "intuitive" because that's what you've internalized - similar to how the the golden age of music was when one was a teenager or young adult.
  - VoodooJuJu 4y ago
    If you want to try using bishops mitres as a unit of measurement, you're more than welcome, but the length of that hat was probably made using a more intuitive reference unit, you might want to use that instead, maybe it was cubits, I'm not sure. >an appeal to nature then No. It's an explanation that imperial & similar ancient measurement units were adopted with the goal of being simple and intuitive for people to quickly understand. This was accomplished by choosing immediately relatable reference points. In the case of a hogshead barrel, that reference point was the ox head. A mile, that's 1000 paces, that's both simple to remember and intuitive. A kilometer, that's 621.4 paces, that's neither simple to remember nor intuitive. No unit in the metric system maps simply to anything a human can immediately relate to, this is by definition of each unit in the system.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      > No unit in the metric system maps simply to anything a human can immediately relate to This "intuition" is not intrinsic, though, but is because of familiarity. If you've done track sports (or watched athletics), you can visualize 100m. If you've watched NFL, you can "intuit" 10 yards empirically - not because it equals to 30 feet and you look at your own feet. The same goes for 21"/27"/42"/60" (TVs). The only scenario I can imagine where of human-relatibility would matter is when the unit is unknown to the listener, e.g. if someone introduced me to a carlength (or the notoriously unintuitive 'length of a football field'); however, this is now completely unnecessary with modern education and standardization The origin of the measure is just lore, and counts for nothing; which is why being immersed into a system which you were previously unfamiliar with (metric or imperial) bestows the same "intuitiveness" - as anyone who joined the US army can tell you. The argument that imperial units are somehow relatable as they are similar to naturally occurring things is a textbook appeal to nature.

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

>Here, one always buys water in in 0.5 litre, 0.75 litres or 1 litre (=0.5,0.75 and 1 kilo), so it's even more relatable than your hand of berries Metric units can certainly be adapted to be fractionally relatable, though their origins are certainly not, as I mentioned: >we can still more or less relate these metric units to things in our day-to-day life for better conceptualization, but because they're arbitrary, they don't map 1:1, whereas imperial and ancient units were naturally emergent rather than arbitrary and they mapped one to one per their definitions. The grandparent comment mentioned how nonsensical or absurd "hogshead" is as a unit of measurement, and the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural.

sangnoir 4y ago
> the essence of the response was that "hogshead" is actually rather sensical, originating from something very relatable and natural. So, its an appeal to nature then? Somehow, I doubt it'd make a difference if meter was derived from the total lengths of bishops mitres at parish (everyone knows how tall those hats are - relatable!). Units are only "intuitive" because that's what you've internalized - similar to how the the golden age of music was when one was a teenager or young adult.
- VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  If you want to try using bishops mitres as a unit of measurement, you're more than welcome, but the length of that hat was probably made using a more intuitive reference unit, you might want to use that instead, maybe it was cubits, I'm not sure. >an appeal to nature then No. It's an explanation that imperial & similar ancient measurement units were adopted with the goal of being simple and intuitive for people to quickly understand. This was accomplished by choosing immediately relatable reference points. In the case of a hogshead barrel, that reference point was the ox head. A mile, that's 1000 paces, that's both simple to remember and intuitive. A kilometer, that's 621.4 paces, that's neither simple to remember nor intuitive. No unit in the metric system maps simply to anything a human can immediately relate to, this is by definition of each unit in the system.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > No unit in the metric system maps simply to anything a human can immediately relate to This "intuition" is not intrinsic, though, but is because of familiarity. If you've done track sports (or watched athletics), you can visualize 100m. If you've watched NFL, you can "intuit" 10 yards empirically - not because it equals to 30 feet and you look at your own feet. The same goes for 21"/27"/42"/60" (TVs). The only scenario I can imagine where of human-relatibility would matter is when the unit is unknown to the listener, e.g. if someone introduced me to a carlength (or the notoriously unintuitive 'length of a football field'); however, this is now completely unnecessary with modern education and standardization The origin of the measure is just lore, and counts for nothing; which is why being immersed into a system which you were previously unfamiliar with (metric or imperial) bestows the same "intuitiveness" - as anyone who joined the US army can tell you. The argument that imperial units are somehow relatable as they are similar to naturally occurring things is a textbook appeal to nature.