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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Science Memes
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Your point about intuition is moot, imo, because if you didn’t grow up with F it’s just as unintuitive as C is to you.
When you’re used to it the usage of decimals and negative numbers is neither complicated nor unintuitive because you’ve learned to know this intuitively for your whole life.
I could argue, that freezing temps outside being below 0 are unintuitive because it’s obvious to me that negative temps mean it’s literally freezing cold. That’s intuitive for me because I‘ be used that my entire life. Same as room temperature being 20°C. It just makes sense to me because I‘ve always know it that way.
Your "intuitive anchor points" 32 or 66 or whatever are completely nonsensical and unintuitive to someone whose brain is wired in Celsius. Because we don’t think in -18 to 38 but rather -20 to 40, if you want to think of it like that (or -40 to 20 I suppose, if you live somewhere where it’s colder). But in all honesty, in my day to day life, I don’t think about that, because I just know what a celsius value means intuitively.
Fahrenheit is more intuitive for the average American, not the average person.
I don't think you're taking into account that the average person is really bad at math. There's a lot of people around the world that are illiterate.
Anything can be intuitive if you're intelligent enough. But when something is described as intuitive, that implies that it can be easily understood. Put it this way, if F is 1/10 difficulty, C is 2/10 and Kelvin is 5/10.
Would you also argue that Kelvin is intuitive?
Just because Celsius works perfectly fine doesn't mean that Fahrenheit doesn't make more intuitive sense.
I'm sorry, but if you go out on a cold day and see a barrel of water with ice on the top, you immediately know it's freezing cold and we're in the negatives. Water freezing being 0 is a solid, objective anchor point.
"When it feels cold" will vary from someone that lives in a generally warm climate to someone that lives in a colder climate but water will freeze at 0. That means the warm and cold people can base their range around that and intuitively understand how far or above or below 0 the extreme hot or cold areas are. Generally -40 to 40 are the extremes of livable areas.
Sure, water is a really good system and it works well.
And for F that range is -40 to 104. See how you get 64 extra degrees of precision and nearly all of them are double digit numbers? No downside.
Furthermore F can use its base 10 system to describe useful ranges of temperature such as the 20s, 60s, etc. So you have 144 degrees instead of just 80, and you also have the option to utilize a more broad 16 degree scale that's also built in.
You might say that Celsius technically also has an 8 degree scale(10s, 30s), but I would argue that the range of 10 degrees Celsius is too broad to be useful in the same way. In order to scale such that 0C is water freezing and 100C boiling, it was necessary for the units to become larger and thus the 10C shorthand is much less descriptive than the 10F shorthand, at least for most human purposes.
Fahrenheit stays winning in my book.
It could easily be argued that weather having to deal in so high numbers is a con for F and the positive negative distinction of C is an easy to understand system of how far from snow are we. As others I don’t believe one is particularly better than the other for the purpose of describing day to day weather. Your arguments ring hollow to me and often seem based on heuristics for F and often with the “close to this value” caveat making it seem like a stretch.
That might be true but only if you live in a climate that actually has temperatures from about 0-100F. If you don’t (which most people don’t), it’s just as arbitrary. If you live somewhere it’s freezing regularly, it’s good to know if the roads will be icy (below 0°C) or not (above 0°C). If you live somewhere where it’s regularly above 100F and rarely below 50F, that scale doesn’t really work intuitively either, anymore.
And of course Kelvin isn’t intuitive but that’s because it isn’t centered around anything within the human experience. Frozen and boiling water are within the human experience however. And again, if you’d have only ever used K, it’d come just as easy to you as F does now.