• Mrs_deWinter@feddit.orgEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    and this is generally the case. I’m sure if you were to sample the opinion of people randomly, this is roughly what you would get back.

    Only if you asked people accustomed to Fahrenheit. People who aren’t used to it cannot use it without prior understanding at all. To think otherwise just proves your confirmation bias again.

    I may have said that it was an intuitive feature of fahrenheit, and it is, and so is the 0-100 scale of water freezing/boiling in celsius, but that’s irrelevant aside from the fact that it’s intuitive

    Then what should “intuitive” even mean if not “intuitive to use”? Because it certainly isn’t that.

      • Mrs_deWinter@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        ok, so you genuinely think, that people who use celsius cannot experience the sensation of “hot” and “cold” without a number referencing the temperature directly in front of them? Specifically that of the celsius system?

        No and that’s not what I claimed. What I’m saying is that if you tell someone accustomed to Celcius “it’s 42F° outside, oh by the way fahrenheit goes from 0=really cold to 100=really hot”, they have no idea about the actual weather. The points of 0 and 100 Fahrenheit are way to arbitrary to be understood without having experienced them.

        “Really cold” and “really hot” are completely subjective. They depend on the climate you’re used to and come down to personal preference even. Your “really cold” might be my “pleasantly chilly”. And even if I knew what 0F° and 100F° were in C° I’d have no idea how that relates to the (probably much more common) values between them. Percentages of subjective temperature tell me nothing. 20F° would basically have to be 20% warmer than “really cold”, right? Intuitively I would have guessed somewhere around 7°C (nice autumn morning), turns out 20F° is still way below the freezing point. The idea of 0F° and 100F° does not, in fact, help me interpret these values “with no prior understanding”.

        It’s simply not an intuitive frame of reference - except if you have at one point learned what the numbers mean. And at this point it’s exactly as useful als Celcius.