this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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There is a reason. When you grow up with people around you using imperial units to describe things, you think in terms of it. If you tell me 10 ft., I can picture that in my head, I have an idea of how much that is in real terms. If you tell me 10m, I have no mental idea of how much that is, even if I can convert it. It’s like a language you grow up speaking, versus one you learn later in life.
I do think metric the sole system used in schools, to be honest.
That's true, but it's also a double edged sword: you can easily learn metric just by switching to it.
Try setting a weather widget on your phone to only show you Celsius and don't convert it to Fahrenheit, over time you will get an intuitive understanding of what feels cold to you.
The biggest block to learning a new system is insulating yourself with conversions IMO, imagine trying to learn a new language by just having everyone speak into Google translate
I'm fluent in metric but I can't think in anything but imperial, I'm merely converting in my head on the fly
Yep, that's my life, pretty much. OTOH, my kids don't have to live under the curse of arbitrary units of measurement and only have a vague idea of what a foot is.
That’s a good idea that I think I will try out. To be honest, I have a pretty hard time visualizing distance, even with imperial, so sadly I don’t think that help will help me in that area.
It’s weird, because small units I think about it cm, not imperial.
I'm the same actually, I'm probably more likely to say 1cm than half an inch
Millimeters as well for you? It’s probably because having to use fractions is so much less intuitive.
Millimeters especially, no way am I saying like "1/24th of an inch"
I'm doing the slow switch with decimal time. It works!
Plenty of people in Canada had no trouble switching back when we did.
The good thing with metric though is it's easier to visualise other measurements once you know one of them, cause you just know that each other measurement is just a multiple or division of the one you know. Like if you know roughly how long a centimetre is then you can take a good estimate of how long a meter is knowing that it's 100cm
I mean, yeah, I’m not arguing that imperial is a better system. Metric is superior, absolutely. I’m just arguing against the statement that there’s no reason to use it.
Did you grow up using metric?
It was much more mixed when i was in primary school but by the time I left secondary school it was fully metric. It might've fully changed before I noticed though just cause I was little and parents and grandparents would still be using imperial. I do remember having to learn imperial in school though.