Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I live in both worlds, metric and imperial. I know one is objectively better. That's not what I'm saying.
What I'm telling you is that the world is full of convoluted, arbitrary standards. Even the length of 1 meter or 1gram was arbitrary to start. Using 100 divisions of liquid water's STP points is very arbitrary. Science uses what it wants. Great. Science used to demand people speak Latin or French, too.
What you're also missing is that 99% of Americans do not care one bit that people going to university need to learn something else. They also learn fancy words! They learn how to use the weird v on the calculator! They're expected to learn strange esoteric nonsense (per the average person). That's work for them.
Whatever the large, large number of people on the left side of the IQ bell curve learn as kids is what will stick because many undereducated people deal with a lot of fear and living life around loss aversion. Changing something like units of measure is a fundamental element of their experience in life. To change that triggers huge loss aversion biases. Idiot patents will wage culture wars so they can raise kids just as stupid as they are. You don't even understand this is a psychological issue.
Go look at the panic around the redesign of the US dollar I'm 1996. I forget who said it, but "Americans are creatures of habit." We treat our post-WWII "traditions" like they're older than the sun. It's a conservative country, and this change of any sort is fought tooth and nail.
You're trying to use logic to make a case against an emotional and cultural artifact. Disagree all you want. Shout it from the rooftops. Doesn't make it so, or even you "right" or me "wrong." There only wrong is if you think it's a choice the average person makes any more than they choose their name.
And that list should have educated you on how many actually practical things there are that are potentially easier or more practical to change (LOL) before worrying about metric units, like it's some holy war for science. Science don't care about your feelings. It doesn't need you to convince random people online of anything. Go DO science instead.