this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (15 children)

Tread lightly my friend. I already won the Fahrenheit vs. Celsius debate a few months ago, but non-Americans are insanely defensive about the metric system and won't accept the truth.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/9757434

I'll transcribe my best arguments because that thread was an absolute shitshow and it's hard to find my comment even with the direct link. Almost all of my most downvoted comments on Lemmy came during my defense of the Fahrenheit temperature scale, and I'm weirdly proud of that fact.

Fahrenheit Supremacy GangCelsius is adequate because it’s based on water, and all life on earth is also based on water, so it’s not totally out of our wheelhouse. But for humans specifically I think Fahrenheit is the clear answer.

One point that many may overlook is that most of us here are relatively smart and educated. There are a good number of people on this planet who just aren’t very good with numbers. Obviously a genius could easily adapt their mind to Kelvin or whatever.

You have to use negative numbers more frequently with Celsius > Celsius has a less intuitive frame of reference

Each Celsius degree is nearly two Fahrenheit degrees > Celsius is less granular

The reason I argue the more granular Fahrenheit is more intuitive is because a one degree change should intuitively be quite minor. But since you only have like 40 or 50 degrees to describe the entire gamut of human experiences with Celsius, it blends together a bit too much. I know that people will say to use decimals, but its the same flaw as negative numbers. It’s simply unintuitive and cumbersome.

B) 66F is room temperature. Halfway between freezing (32F) and 100F.

the intuition is learned and not natural.

All scales have to be learned, obviously. It’s far easier to create intuitive anchorpoints in a 0-100 system than a -18 to 38 system. Thus, Fahrenheit is more intuitive for the average person.

I should note that if you are a scientist, the argument completely changes. If you are doing experiments and making calcualtions across a much wider range of temperatures, Celsius and Kelvin are much more intuitive. But we are talking about the average human experience, and for that situation, I maintain Fahrenheit supremacy


It’s not about the specific numbers, but the range that they cover. It’s about the relation of the scale to our lived experience. Hypothetically, if you wanted to design a temperature scale around our species, you would assign the range of 0-100 to the range that would be the most frequently utilized, because those are the shortest numbers. It’s not an absolute range, but the middle of a bell curve which covers 95% of practical scenarios that people encounter. It doesn’t make any sense to start that range at some arbitrary value like 1000 or -18.

When the temperature starts to go above the human body temperature, most humans cannot survive in those environments. Thus, they would have little reason to describe such a temperature. Celsius wastes many double digit numbers between 40-100 that are rarely used. Instead, it forces you to use more negative numbers.

This winter, many days were in the 10s and 20s where I live. Using Celsius would have been marginally more inconvenient in those scenarios, which happen every winter. This is yet another benefit of Fahrenheit, it has a set of base 10 divisions that can be easily communicated, allowing for a convenient level of uncertainty when describing a temperature.


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.

[–] bigschnitz@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (13 children)

You certainly didn't win any arguments with those claims.

0-100f is not anywhere close to the scale people see in the weather anywhere most people live. Taking where I've ever lived as an example:

  • Melbourne ~ 30-120 f vs 0-45c,
  • Gladstone QLD ~40-120f vs 5-45c,
  • Pilbara ~65-130f vs 15c-50c,
  • Dubai ~55-120f vs 20c-45c,
  • Houston TX ~ 30-120f vs 0-45c,
  • Pittsburg PA ~10-90 vs -15-30c.

The most iimportant number with respect to the weather is freezing, it's handy knowing if you're dealing with ice. The standard range for where people live is not -40 degrees, something like 2/3 of the world live between the tropics and will never see freezing or below. The -40 number makes sense if you live in Alaska or Siberia and maybe even somewhere like Minnesota, but certainly not to someone in India or Indonesia....

Neither scale is relative to cooking (which isequally arbitrary for both), though metric is easier for things like brewing 80°C tea since you need 4/5th a cup boiling water and 1/5 a cup and no thermometer.

The "feel" of the weather is hugely impacted by humidity which is why every forecast has a "feels like" measure and why 90°f in Dubai is lovely but 90°f in Houston is miserable. The increments of 10f doesn't make sense at all, though seems to be a common perception among people who prefer fahrenheit

The comment about farenheit being more granular would be true in an alternative universe where decimals don't exist, but not in this one.

Americans literally like farenheit more because it's familiar, any other rationalisation is nonsense. Both measures make perfect sense after you've taken the time to learn them and use them daily (I know this firsthand).

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago (12 children)

The increments of 10f doesn’t make sense at all, though seems to be a common perception among people who prefer fahrenheit

What doesn't make sense about it? You can tell another person it's in the 30s outside, and you have efficiently communicated more information than is possible when using Celsius. You'd have to say it's between 4 and negative 1, which is just lame. And this remains true across every temperature, because of a variety of factors which I explained above.

In every climate which you mentioned above, it's easier to communicate how hot or cold it is outside using Fahrenheit. This is because all of the numbers being used are non-negative integers (aka natural numbers). Even the triple digit ones are one-ten or one-twenty.

I wonder why mathematicians named them that? Possibly because they come naturally? Unlike negative one point seven.

[–] bigschnitz@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

What doesn't make sense about it? You can tell another person it's in the 30s outside, and you have efficiently communicated more information than is possible when using Celsius. You'd have to say it's between 4 and negative 1, which is just lame. And this remains true across every temperature, because of a variety of factors which I explained above.

It doesn't tell you anything that Celsius can't with a 5 degree swing. This the absolute peak of arbitrary, both 5s and 10s are easy scales to work with. Your example of between 4 and negative one is deranged. I'm in houston right, it's 90°f - if I want to comunnicate that to my yankee girlfriend I'd say "babe it's 90° outside, might get up to one hundred" and so far, you're right this is easy to articulate. If I want to communicate that same information to my mum, I'd say "hey it's 30° outside, might get up to 35°". Both cases convey information with the same accuracy, both cases I haven't mentioned humidity, which for actual temperature feel has a way higher influence then 5 degrees, the extra information I'd gain by strictly converting 31-37.8°C is junk data, the farenheit measure is approximated to begin with and because of a humidity swing carries a huge variability in actual "feel" anyway. I tried to explain this above and clearly failed, as your response doesn't touch on this at all and just insists that people who think in metric don't default to easy to work with numbers.

In every climate which you mentioned above, it's easier to communicate how hot or cold it is outside using Fahrenheit. This is because all of the numbers being used are non-negative integers (aka natural numbers). Even the triple digit ones are one-ten or one-twenty.

The only place with negative integers was Pittsburg, so that point doesn't make sense for the rest and even if it was, your argument is insane. Saying negative 5 is no harder than saying 25, plus having negatives where snow and ice come into play makes it obvious when to be careful outside. I mean your argument here just makes no sense, if there is some added complexity to saying "negative" then it is surely comparable to having to remember a random number of 32. Literal kindergardeners understand negative numbers. Neither this or remembering the 32 number add any meaningful complexity and certainly have 0 impact on anyone's actual use of either scale.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Literal kindergardeners understand negative numbers.

Literal adults have trouble with negative numbers. I can't do this all over again, sorry and have a nice day. Hopefully it's somewhere in the 80s wherever you are

[–] bigschnitz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Mate I have to reply to that, because it's such an insane claim - the US, the only country that doesn't use °C, has this huge reliance on a monstrously complex credit system (obviously the entire concept of credit is reliant on the concept of debt and negatives). It's flat out insane to suggest that the same people who live and function with such a credit system conceptually struggle with the fundamentals negative numbers. It's a mind boggling claim.

Anyway, have a good one.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

Yes, as we both know, there aren't any Americans who struggle with a low credit score and end up with insurmountable debt...??? Credit is reliant on debt and negatives, and people get screwed by their lack of understanding it every single day. Same with the lottery, except with big numbers and percentages. America is profoundly dysfunctional and it's frequently the people who are bad at math that get exploited.

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