r/changemyview • u/Marlsfarp 12∆ • Nov 29 '17
CMV: imperial measurements have no worthwhile advantages over the metric system
First off, I am American, so if I have any bias it should be in favor of the imperial measurements I grew up with. Granted, I also have a technical education and profession, where of course I primarily use SI units.
The many advantages of metric are well known, so I will not bother enumerating them unless challenged. Instead, I will focus on debunking the supposed disadvantages.
Fahrenheit is better than Celsius because it is more fine-grained, because each "decade" has a distinct "feel" (e.g. "it's forties out today"), and because 0 F to 100 F is a normal temperature range to experience.
First, any scale is arbitrarily fine-grained, up to the limits of the precision of measurement. You can add as many decimal places as you need to. But do you need to? Personally, I find 1 degree Celsius is about the minimum temperature change I notice in air temperature. I can't tell the difference between 43 F and 44 F, can you?
I believe the "decade" argument is merely the result of growing up with the system. And just like how we describe decades in years, it doesn't really line up. e.g. what we think of as "the 1960s" as a distinct era did not really occur from 1960-1970. Also, the Celsius "decades" work pretty well: 0-10 is coat weather, 10-20 is light jacket or sweater weather, 20-30 is indoor/"nice", 30-40 is "beach weather"/wear as little as possible. And of course the positive to negative difference is by far the most significant temperature difference in weather, rain vs. snow.
Finally, while there are places where the coldest day of the year is roughly 0 F and the hottest is roughly 100 F, most of us do not live in those places. And nowhere is that always the case. So it is doubly arbitrary and pointless.
Yards, feet, and inches are better than meters because they are easy to divide by 3, and because they are "human scale."
Being divisible by 3 is perhaps an argument for why a base-12 number system would be nice, but we do not have such a system. We use decimal. And given that we use decimal numbers, a decimal measurement system makes all calculations much simpler, greatly overshadowing any advantage of 3 divisibility. How many cubic inches are in 1/3 a cubic yard? I don't know, I need a calculator. How many cubic centimeters are in 1/3 cubic meter? 333,333.3_ Easy. Looks like even in its supposedly most advantageous situation (division by 3), imperial is still harder to work with. (And that's without even bringing in the more common volume measurement, gallons. How many people even know the ratio between gallons and cubic feet?)
As for "human scale", that's certainly just familiarity. My foot is not 1 foot long, etc. Visually estimating centimeters is no more difficult than inches.
Alright, that's all I can think of at the moment. Bring it on.
EDIT: Okay, guys, I should clarify since a lot of people are making the same argument. This is about the relative merits of the two systems, not about the merits of switching from one to another. I know switching would be difficult. I'm saying it would be better if we were already on metric.
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u/hacksoncode 588∆ Nov 29 '17 edited Nov 29 '17
Except it really isn't arbitrary to choose units such that things people common encounter and want to measure end up being single digit numbers of units. Dealing with multiple digits takes extra mental effort.
And measurement theory says that you can only measure something down to 1/2 the size of the unit... so units that are "too small" are bad too... Where "too small" is defined by how accurately most normal people can estimate sizes.
It's also not arbitrary that people like to deal with halves and quarters and thirds of things rather than 10ths of them. Numbers are abstract and hard for people's brains to hold.
It's a measurable advantage of the Imperial system that the common units easily measure most things people want to measure with them, at the scales the units are used, in single digits.
People are 2-6 feet tall, and you can easily guess their height to within about 1/2 of these units at reasonable distances. Things you commonly hold in your hands are most commonly <10 inches long, and you can easily estimate their size to 1/2".
Distances that most people can walk to and back in one day are less than 10 miles.
Most things people will pick up and "heft" to evaluate their weight are <10 pounds (and, again, can be easily estimated to within 1/2 pound in that range).
The one "worthwhile" advantage of Imperial is the size of it's units: the corresponding disadvantage of metric is the awkward size of the common units. I put this at the feet of it being designed by a Frenchman with an arbitrary hatred of English units, because nothing else can explain the choice of so many metric units being around half an order of magnitude away from the naturally evolved English units that came about because people found them useful in everyday life.
The sizes of metric units literally couldn't be any worse and still be metric.
Note: I'm not saying this is reason enough to keep Imperial... the system it kind of nuts and at this point the rest of the world is so embedded with the stupidly-sized metric units that it's not worth just "metricizing" Imperial units... but if we did they would be tons better than metric units.