If that was true outsiders should be able to use Fahrenheit without much explanation. I’ve never got a clue what the °F values mean, I always have to use a converter. It’s really not as intuitive as people who grew up with it seem to believe.
Comment on Burning Up
Lizardking27@lemmy.world 1 week agoAlso it’s a 0-100 scale of how hot it is outside, and it requires no prior understanding to use it as such.
Mrs_deWinter@feddit.org 1 week ago
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
If that was true outsiders should be able to use Fahrenheit without much explanation. I’ve never got a clue what the °F values mean, I always have to use a converter. It’s really not as intuitive as people who grew up with it seem to believe.
because it’s all relative, and you need to actually know how the temperatures relate to the things you’re experiencing? I’m going to hazard a guess and say you’re comfortable with using celsius? Oops cognitive bias. You would have to test this on someone who doesn’t understand temperature yet. It just so happens that here in the US, it pretty conveniently lines up with those figures for us.
Mrs_deWinter@feddit.org 1 week ago
If your example cannot be proven on any existing person I’d argue it’s hardly relevant to our reality.
°F most definitely isn’t intuitive enough for people who aren’t accustomed to it to use. If it is more intuitive at all, it’s not to any meaningful degree.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
If your example cannot be proven on any existing person I’d argue it’s hardly relevant to our reality.
possibly? Arguably you could still make the case that the existing range of 0-100f is more pleasant, and arguably nicer to use. But you would have to either find someone uniquely adapted to both systems, or you would have to do a lot of independent study on how humans interact with numbers and ranges of numbers. In order to find a specific answer it’s going to be quite hard.
intuition is bullshit anyway, it’s highly predicated on previous experience and an existing knowledge base, so i feel like that’s kind of arguing “well a race car driver drives good, so why don’t normal drivers drive good” kind of territory.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 week ago
Exactly. Fahrenheit is just metric weather.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
The freezing point of water is very important to weather, and requires prior knowledge of the arbitrary number 32.
Lizardking27@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Okay so fahrenheit has a well-defined high and low, but an arbitrary freezing point of one certain chemical. All other chemical freezing points are arbitrary.
Celsius has an arbitrary high and low, but a well-defined freezing point of that same chemical. All other freezing points are arbitrary.
If your motivation is to minimize the amount of arbitrary values you have to memorize, fahrenheit is the clear winner.
criticon@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
The 0 in Fahrenheit was based on nothing and the 100F was supposed to be human temperature but it is off by some degrees
The water is not an arbitrary temperature, the weather is water dependant, at 0C the water will freeze and you get snow/ice instead of rain
actually@lemmy.world 1 week ago
0°F is when the ocean freezes
100° F was human body temperature, later revised somewhat with better measurements and a decrease of parasites . The average person in those days in London had a slightly higher body temperature than today
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
It’s not like the weather depends on the boiling point of formaldehyde…
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The zero C is freezing and 100 C is boiling, so not really arbitrary.
But it’s pretty hard to define a scale that has intuitive, round numbers for everything we might care about.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
yeah, and let me know how accurate our weather models and prediction systems are. Can you calculate accurately how much the temperature in a specific part of the atmosphere will drop to a large updraft?
What’s that? This is literally an entire career field of study and development? Oh that’s weird.
Also the only real time this is relevant, is when things that have this weird property called thermal mass get below freezing, it’s snowing in 30f weather? That’s not sticking, the ground is too warm. or the sun will literally just melt it even if it is cold enough. Water? You mean that weird thing called like, a lake or river? Those get below freezing, without actively freezing, lakes won’t even drop that much in terms of temperature, aside from the surface level. The surface may freeze, but even that is pretty variable.
Also yes, it’s the arbitrary number of 32, so is literally every number though. We have 2 numbers to remember, you also have 2 numbers to remember, god forbid you have like, a password, or a passcode, or like, a numbers based lock somewhere. Humans have never been known to be good at memorizing short strings of data.
like idk how to tell you this, but, it’s not that big of a deal?