this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Also it's a 0-100 scale of how hot it is outside, and it requires no prior understanding to use it as such.
The freezing point of water is very important to weather, and requires prior knowledge of the arbitrary number 32.
Is it? Only pure water will actually freeze at 0c. Rain, puddles, lakes, etc aren't all that pure... And we're talking about ambient air temps here. The air can be below freezing and it can still rain. And you can get snow/hail above freezing...
Knowing the freezing point is just one factor. Knowing it's generally around 30F is pretty much always close enough (not that remembering 32 is actually very difficult)
Edit: also water only freezes at 0c if it's at sea level... I really don't think 0°=freezing is the huge advantage that celcius stans think it is.
yeah, and let me know how accurate our weather models and prediction systems are. Can you calculate accurately how much the temperature in a specific part of the atmosphere will drop to a large updraft?
What's that? This is literally an entire career field of study and development? Oh that's weird.
Also the only real time this is relevant, is when things that have this weird property called thermal mass get below freezing, it's snowing in 30f weather? That's not sticking, the ground is too warm. or the sun will literally just melt it even if it is cold enough. Water? You mean that weird thing called like, a lake or river? Those get below freezing, without actively freezing, lakes won't even drop that much in terms of temperature, aside from the surface level. The surface may freeze, but even that is pretty variable.
Also yes, it's the arbitrary number of 32, so is literally every number though. We have 2 numbers to remember, you also have 2 numbers to remember, god forbid you have like, a password, or a passcode, or like, a numbers based lock somewhere. Humans have never been known to be good at memorizing short strings of data.
like idk how to tell you this, but, it's not that big of a deal?
Okay so fahrenheit has a well-defined high and low, but an arbitrary freezing point of one certain chemical. All other chemical freezing points are arbitrary.
Celsius has an arbitrary high and low, but a well-defined freezing point of that same chemical. All other freezing points are arbitrary.
If your motivation is to minimize the amount of arbitrary values you have to memorize, fahrenheit is the clear winner.
The zero C is freezing and 100 C is boiling, so not really arbitrary.
But it's pretty hard to define a scale that has intuitive, round numbers for everything we might care about.
You're correct. In a lab setting, 0C and 100C are not arbitrary.
In the weather forecast, they are.
Which ties into your final point, it's hard to define a scale that is best for everything, which is exactly what I've been saying this whole time. Fahrenheit is better for some things, Celsius for others.
The only reason people in this thread are saying otherwise is because for some reason they've tied up some significant part of their self-worth into their belief that "lmao DAE fahrenheit bad amirite??1?", and they mistakenly believe that those of us that understand nuance are trying to belittle or disparage them in some way. I assure you, we are not.
well i mean technically, the only reason they aren't arbitrary is because the mean something, the numbers arent significant, it's what they represent, which is the boiling/freezing point of water.
i'm seeing people put very little thought into the things they're saying, i just recently posted a comment covering a few of those things in this thread. For some reason europeans seem to just get absolutely brainfucked when presented with the concept of a unit system that isn't metric, it's like your literal entire lives are built upon the concept of 0 10 100 scaling, and you can't consider literally anything outside of it.
Now maybe i'm being a little hyperbolic here, but US peeps pretty well understand that we could just "be using celsius" that's not really a wacky concept or idea here. Celsius peeps really seem to think that if they had to use fahrenheit, they would probably die from accidental over-consumption of water, somehow. And in their defense, a lot of our shit is kinda fucking weird. But again, it's really not that bad.
at least, this has been my experience from the various threads i've been in on this topic over time.
The 0 in Fahrenheit was based on nothing and the 100F was supposed to be human temperature but it is off by some degrees
The water is not an arbitrary temperature, the weather is water dependant, at 0C the water will freeze and you get snow/ice instead of rain
0°F is when the ocean freezes
100° F was human body temperature, later revised somewhat with better measurements and a decrease of parasites . The average person in those days in London had a slightly higher body temperature than today
0F is not ocean freezing, is the freezing temp of a brine mix that he chose arbitrarily (some think that he chose that temp because it was close to the coldest his town had ever been and he used it to calibrate the scales of his thermometers)
FYI, the ocean freezes at around 28F
Oceans freezing also depends on currents, and mixing of the water from the surface. 28° will freeze water in a room.
This is why often the ocean is not frozen at much lower temperatures.
I’m not at all cognizant of how 0 was decided
It’s not like the weather depends on the boiling point of formaldehyde…
If that was true outsiders should be able to use Fahrenheit without much explanation. I've never got a clue what the °F values mean, I always have to use a converter. It's really not as intuitive as people who grew up with it seem to believe.
because it's all relative, and you need to actually know how the temperatures relate to the things you're experiencing? I'm going to hazard a guess and say you're comfortable with using celsius? Oops cognitive bias. You would have to test this on someone who doesn't understand temperature yet. It just so happens that here in the US, it pretty conveniently lines up with those figures for us.
If your example cannot be proven on any existing person I'd argue it's hardly relevant to our reality.
°F most definitely isn't intuitive enough for people who aren't accustomed to it to use. If it is more intuitive at all, it's not to any meaningful degree.
possibly? Arguably you could still make the case that the existing range of 0-100f is more pleasant, and arguably nicer to use. But you would have to either find someone uniquely adapted to both systems, or you would have to do a lot of independent study on how humans interact with numbers and ranges of numbers. In order to find a specific answer it's going to be quite hard.
intuition is bullshit anyway, it's highly predicated on previous experience and an existing knowledge base, so i feel like that's kind of arguing "well a race car driver drives good, so why don't normal drivers drive good" kind of territory if you arent careful.
Yeah, which is why most people here in favor of Celcius argue that Fahrenheit isn't, in fact, more intuitive and therefore more suited to describe the weather. Both are arbitrary, both can be learned and used very easily, the only difference is what you're used to.
yeah, but i think arguing that celsius is "more intuitive" when the one primary advantage outside of science is that it lines up with water relatively nicely compared to fahrenheit, is like, ok.
32f and 212f and 0c and 100c aren't really all that substantially different as far as the general use case goes.
Nobody is arguing that though.
hmm.
"Fahrenheit isn't more intuitive" doesn't not mean "Celcius is more intuitive". You're mistaken if you think that's what's being argued here.
Neither one is intuitive. Intuition isn't a useful metric here anyway. After all we could ask: Which one is more intuitive - kilometers or miles? Kilograms or pounds? Do we have to change how me measure time (base 12) to a base 10 as well, would that be more intuitive?
Answer is no. All those units have to be learned and filled with experience anyway. Nobody can interpret temperature scales intuitively, neither Fahrenheit nor Celsius.
Fahrenheit simply has no advantage over Celcius. And it doesn't have to. Some people are used to it, so keep using it by all means. Don't argue that it's superior and we're all good.
i mean, fundamentally that's what that statement would have to mean, unless you're referring to a rock being more intuitive or something.
Why would you mention that fahrenheit isn't as intuitive as celsius, if celsius wasn't objectively more intuitive? Also why did you use a triple negative?
ultimately yeah, neither system is more intuitive than the other. Celsius has a nice use case in science and research, but that's about it. fahrenheit isn't really used anywhere outside of weather, and cooking, where it also doesn't really matter, and no cooking is not "water based chemistry" as someone tried to propose.
also technically time isn't really in base 12. one year is 12 months, is 31-30 days, is 24 hours, is 60 minutes, is 60 seconds, is then broken into tenths, hundreths, and thousandths of a second from there, etc... It's not quite one specific system, just a hodgepodge of multiple different structures.
exactly! I'm not arguing that fahrenheit is better, i'm just trying to get europeans to think it isn't the single most useless system in the world because they spent 12 seconds thinking about things and got confused when they didn't spend and more time on it.
I think a lot of people in this thread are just being objectively stupid, and not quite realizing it, and thus saying silly things that don't make any sense. Europeans seem to do this a lot whenever the US customary unit system comes up in discussion, and i don't understand why.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
hey man, i didn't make the claim. i'm just came here to complain about celsius users not thinking about things. If you can find an example of me saying fahrenheit is more intuitive, i'll have to eat my words.
Originally you replied to me, replying to someone else claiming fahrenheit was "a 0-100 scale of how hot it is outside" and required "no prior understanding to use it as such". This was never about Celsius being intuitive or not, it was about Fahrenheit. If you didn't disagree with me there, your replies to me were pointless. Since then you seem to be arguing against a straw man.
I never claimed Celcius to be intuitive, in fact I claimed the opposite - neither scale is intuitive. Therefore Fahrenheit and Celcius are equally useful in measuring the weather and the idea of Fahrenheit being especially suitable is incorrect, based on the confirmation bias of those who are already used to it. That's the only argument I'm making here.
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. 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, and that point of contextual relevance you might as well mention that plants are green, and that the sky is blue.
possibly, but i'm mostly complaining about the collective response here, not the particular responses in this thread in particular. Which is also quite long so i don't even really recall what has been said here to be specifically accurate.
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.
Then what should "intuitive" even mean if not "intuitive to use"? Because it certainly isn't that.
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?
I understand the point you're trying to make, but it's irrelevant and doesn't matter. If you were to put someone into a room at either 0 or 100 degrees fahrenheit (without telling them the temperature of the room), from a climate relatively similar to the US, they would either say "it's really cold" or "it's really hot" even if they're not directly from a similar climate, it would still be relatively inline with these expectations.
this is what we mean when we say "really hot" and "really cold" the human body has an innate response to the temperatures that it experiences. Classifying it accurately is hard. But in this case it doesn't need to be, it's a heuristic.
think of a hammer, an intuitive feature of a hammer is pretty obvious, there is only one realistic way to use it. You can't grab it by the hand and do much with it. The head itself is shaped and specifically designed for a certain type of use case, and the handle is pretty clearly built for holding onto.
going further, an intuitive feature of a rock is the ability to move/throw it. There are certain thing that are so fundamental to the human experience, there isn't much in the way of conceptualization there.
intuition is simply the ability to naturally reason without external influence. For example, being able to place your foot where it needs to be so you don't fall down a cliff. And intuitive system would be one that is innately familiar to the user, which obviously nothing is. But systems can have intuitive features or design elements however.
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.
obviously, but nobody was saying that, so i'm not sure why it's relevant.
This is like explaining what a door is to someone, only for them to remove the door and go "well now what's it supposed to do?"
not strictly? 0f is cold enough to require wearing additional layers if you don't want to freeze and die after a long enough period of time. 100f, while more livable, is still rather hot. Hot enough that you can't really do hard labor in that weather. Even people who live in climates that are really hot know this, and there's a reason they often wear really specific clothing, or end up having darker skin. Although that's evolutionary advantage at that point.
Unless you took someone living in finland, and someone living in australia. Although deserts aren't really a fair comparison here either. They can get quite cold as well. They're obviously going to have a bit of a different reaction, but i doubt it's going to be significant enough to break the scale. It's probably going to shift one way or the other a little bit, but that's to be expected.
again, you're applying celsius logic to a fahrenheit problem, and then being surprised when it doesn't work. You don't know what 0f is, not because fahrenheit is stupid and bad, but because you don't use it. So you're trying to estimate into a system you don't know, and then you're complaining about my generalization when it's your translation that doesn't work. It's clearly evident because you even say "20f is way below freezing" which is not at all true here in the fahrenheit lands. 20f is just below freezing here. well below freezing happens when you crack around 10-15f. Way below freezing is quite literally, about 0f.
no it doesn't and thats because you have an anti thetical world view that you're trying to apply to it. This breaks the application of the heuristic very evidently.
sure, but my point is still that the 0f-100f is a broadly applicable heuristic that should roughly hold true. i believe if you convert these numbers into celsius, which is how you would correctly apply this heuristic, you would see something roughly equivalent to -20c and 40c, which to me seems to line up with how celsius peeps seem to experience temperature.
You're missing the point here entirely.
Is Fahrenheit intuitive? No, proven by the fact that it can't be used without prior understanding, as shown in my example.
The rest is sealioning.
no, and neither is any other numbering system, it's all arbitrary we already determined this.
as you try and apply celsius logic to the fahrenheit system in order to understand fahrenheit, incorrectly... While still ignoring my prime example here.
Exactly. Fahrenheit is just metric weather.