3 ms·
Aside, but I'll meander to the heart of your point: As an American who's lived in Canada and Europe, I'll freely acknowledge the superiority of the metric syst
by bravura 4y ago
Aside, but I'll meander to the heart of your point:
As an American who's lived in Canada and Europe, I'll freely acknowledge the superiority of the metric system to imperial measures. EXCEPT celsius.
With Fahrenheit, you can describe a temperature with a single digit: in the thirties, in the forties, etc.
In Celsius, you're forced to add an extra bit of precision: low tens, high tens, etc.
Celsius-lovers find this argument infuriating and will go through all sorts of contortions to justify it: But what about the boiling point of water?
Who cares about the boiling point of water? Scientists. Chefs. But 99% of the time we talk about temperature, we care about the weather.
And this is sort of the point we're both getting at. That human-like intelligence is of particular value to us, in addition to non-human superintelligence at particular domains.
postscript: The anti-Fahrenheit thing is more a discomfort and lack of familiarity. An easy technique for explaining the intuition behind fahrenheit, for describing the weather, is "what percent 'hot' is it"? 80F is 80% hot. Not totally hot. Good-natured people will usually appreciate this rubric. The sort of people who enjoying sorting grains of rice will persist in winnowing the chaff here and perhaps point out that I'm mixing metaphors.
- jbotz 4y agoThe boiling point of water may not be very significant to daily human experience, but the freezing point is, at least for people who don't live in the tropics. Celcius does better there than Fahrenheit, doesn't it? What "percent cold" is it in Fahrenheit land? Also I don't like your argument that "only scientists" care about the boiling point of water because we live in a scientific society and for it to function well it is extremely important that everybody has at least some basic scientific literacy. Having separate temperature scales for scientists and "common folk" is at least one little step away from that goal.
- staunton 4y ago> Having separate temperature scales for scientists and "common folk" is at least one little step away from that goal. so you'd actually prefer to get weather forecasts in Kelvin?
- jbotz 4y agoBiologists and chemists, and yes, of course, meteorologists and climatologists, routinely use Celcius, not Kelvin, in scientific publications. So that's a strawman.
- staunton 4y agoThe point is that scientists use units appropriate to their domain and community. The general public uses units appropriate for their uses. These usually do not coincide. There would be advantages (e.g. for standardization, "science literacy") if they used the same units but it would also be impractical for whichever side adjusts to use the other's units. I believe the advantages of such a switch are very small and the downsides small. Neither scientists nor the general public seem to think this is a problem.