this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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As someone who moved to the US later in life, I learned to use fahrenheit because there's no way to talk to anyone about the weather or cooking otherwise.
If you need to do the same one day, don't bother trying to convert in your head. Just learn the numbers conversationally. Familiarize yourself with how the weather feels with the number weather app shows.
I can't convert at all but I can use both C and F in conversation because one rarely needs exact numbers anyway. You learn the ballparks pretty quick.
I find the conversion between the two easy enough to do it my head.
This isn't exact but is close enough for conversations and 99% of my needs.
(Temp in F - 30) / 2Examples
The actual number is 21 / -12 but this is close enough for me 99.9% of the time
When you actually need to convert, sure. For conversation, try it my way. It'll be noticeably more efficient.
Isn't Fahrenheit a "feel" temperature unit anyway? Once you need precision (science), even Americans switch to Celsius/Kelvin.
FWIW Fahrenheit has more precision for the temperatures you most commonly feel. Day-to-day you're likely to feel temps between 10-32°C (range of 22°), which is 50-90°F (range of 40°). It might not seem like a big deal, but I can tell a difference in my house when setting my thermostat from 68°F to 69°F; conversely, if I turn my thermostat to C mode both values get rounded to 20.
But yes, as an American, I think of CPU temps in terms of C, I know water freezes at 0°C/32°F, I know water boils at 100°C but have never committed to memory what it is in F, and in chem classes we always use C/K.
Can you set your thermostat to 68.5°F? I can set mine to 21.5°C, does that mean I have more precision? This precision argument is nonsense.
You should find a better thermostat. Most thermostats that I have used had at least a precision of 0.5 ºC.
This, for sure. I live in the US and wanted to learn to understand Celsius so I switched my phone to use it. Internalizing a system works where translating/converting does not. I quickly learned that I feel comfortable in temperatures in the 20s. Since I feel comfortable in Fahrenheit temps in the upper 60s to mid 70s I can guess what the conversion is for most temps, but I don't have to do it to understand that I like how 22 C feels.
Similarly, if you're traveling and having to use a foreign currency I prefer to establish an idea in my head of cheap, reasonable, expensive than stopping to convert every price exactly. A "reasonable price" is relative to the item and location, of course, and should also affect my perspective.
Absorbing a new system by this method works fairly easily for temperatures and money, but less so for other measurements. I don't have as fine-tuned a sense of what ounces, pounds, or grams feel like as I do units of temperature. And I am always adding or subtracting 12 to understand time when expressed as 13h and up.
During the brief period when the US was encouraging metric system understanding there were many highway speed limit signs expressed as 55 mph / 88 kph. Every time I need to make that conversion I think of 5/8 because of that sign. And I usually just make guesstimates that work well enough.
I like learning new things. The generation before me in my family turned off their brains long ago and now suffer dementia. I work to keep my mind active. Learning other units of measure is one example.
Finally I'll say that I WISH I could get to a point of understanding languages this way without translation.
Sadly, language is a bit iffy when it comes to internalizing.
Unless you learn a language when you're a child, and ideally starting before you're ten, you won't get instinctive enough to match a native speaker's. That's just how our brain development works.
There's a special linguistic plasticity which is the language learning instinct that's fully active until we're ten or so and gradually declines and pretty much stops when we're in our early twenties.
What you learn until then is used by the language centers of your brain and is more or less reflexive. You don't need to think about it to use it, like walking.
After that, we can only learn languages intellectuality, which means we do have to think about it and deliberately listen and speak (or read and write obviously) using our prefrontal cortex.
Maybe one day we'll invent a technology or some medical treatment to turn it back on in later life.
This is called the Critical Period hypothesis, and it's still a controversial area of active research, with many linguists and experiments on each side of the argument, so it's premature to talk about it in absolutes like this.
Terrific insight. I had often wondered if that alone would assist with adoption if it became standard in the US. That, or we would just print it in two formats all the time..
Thank you, this is a a great idea! I've found these common temperatures online, in case anyone wants to learn them:
See, that's the problem with these "Fahrenheit is more intuitive" arguments. They are catered to a very specific country with a very specific climate. For me, 25-30 ºC is an average late spring day.
It's intuitive to those who grew up using it. For me, Celsius is much more intuitive because people around me used it all my life and refer to common temperatures in Celsius.
So I think intuitiveness is very subjective and not a good criterion to judge a unit by.