this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Because precision has nothing to do with it and it's all about being easy to convert between different units and having sensible zero and 100-points for temperature?
How often do you convert temperature to different units? Isn't that what we are stupid for doing?
And I would like to know why precision is irrelevant for temperature but relevant for other things.
I'm being genuine, I'm not trying to shit on you. I'm pretty open about liking the metric system, and I think the reason we don't use it is largely the extreme administrative costs of doing so more than anyone thinking imperial is actually better. I think most agree it's pretty clearly worse.
But I legitimately don't understand how people can argue Celsius over fahrenheit when the arguments for fahrenheit largely match those for the metric system.
I was talking about Metric as a whole, where the units of measurement for distance, mass, etc. are easily convertible and the unit for temperature has sensible zero- and 100-points. I would have thought that was obvious.
Why would you talk about metric as a whole in response to a question asking about Celsius in particular? I very openly stated that I understand why metric in general is used for measurements of length, weight, and volume and asked specifically why people argue that Celsius is superior when its weaknesses in comparison to fahrenheit are similar to imperial's weaknesses in comparison to metric.
I would have thought that was obvious.
Fahrenheit has a fairly sensible 0 - just as Celsius is the temp of ice water, Fahrenheit is the temp of salty ice water.
Why write 36.111 C when you could write 97 F? Its the same reason you write 3cm instead of 0.03m. Its just more convenient even though its the same thing.
Why write 96.8 F when you could write 36 C? Do you honestly believe that we're thinking about temperatures in Fahrenheit and then just converting to Celsius when we write them down?
In fairness to Fahrenheit, you can round it to a whole number with a lesser difference in feel. That's more for feel though, for measurements of temp in cooking or chemistry, Celsius is useful due to boiling point.
Agreed, though if you are measuring it via instrument then what difference does it make how "round" the number is?
I was more thinking of when you're telling your friend what the temperature is outside, or scenarios similar to that. It's not useful in most other applications.
What difference does it make if the temperature is 79 or 80 F? That's a difference of about half a Celsius, and as a Celsius user, I can tell you that I don't plan my daily life based on a half a degree difference, or even a one degree difference; 5 degree precision is almost always enough.
Why on earth would I think that? I made the comparison to other units of measurement to demonstrate why smaller units are useful in some cases. There are cases where its not useful, but there are also many cases where the advantages of Celsius aren't useful. Neither is inherently better, the correct one to use is the one you know better or the one that fits the use case better.