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Why do people who try to convince others to switch to metric focus so much on the conversions?
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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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I haven't really been trying to convince people to switch, but I have been telling people I've switched to metric for at least temperature (so far).
And that's less to conversation about how it's just objectively better than fahrenheit in literally every single way, except familiarity. Which given that any switch in life would have that problem, I see that as a non-issue.
Scales should never be based on arbitrary things, or creatively-decided things. They should have a concrete, absolute, and objective thing they're based on, and keeping it based on a certain number for scales of units is better than 12in to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, etc.
It doesn't necessarily have to be base 10, but given that's what it society uses, that's probably best for us, but any base will do, as long as it's consistent.
I'm fairly certain the only reason we don't know the things Fahrenheit was based on is because he didn't write it down.
While Celsius is based on something real (the freezing, and boiling points of distilled water at sea level), it's not something that someone can measure at most locations? Fahrenheit has the same issue, mind you, the only calibration point it had that's always measurable is the average body temperature, which is also inconsistent, as anyone who's tried getting pregnant will know.
At the end of the day anything we base a temperature scale on could be considered arbitrary, though modern Fahrenheit is also based on freezing/boiling water, we just put the points at 32 and 212 (180 degrees between) instead of 0 and 100 (100 degrees between). AFAIK the reason the freezing point is at 32 was because the original 0 point was based on the freezing point of a brine solution? Either way, point is now they're both based on the same thing: When a specific uncontaminated liquid changes phases at on specific parts of the planet that don't exist in a lot of countries
While true picking anything is arbitrary, picking something that's reliably constant on this planet is definitely less so than old measurements of the length of some king's arm length or whatever that cannot be intuitive to anyone at all (unless their arm happens to be the same I guess, but that's very inconsistent at best).
Maybe I was too vague, but picking something that can be derived consistently is ordered of magnitude less arbitrary than whatever literally everything in the imperial system is.
As for fahrenheit's original 0° being an "oopsie", clearly the high end is very clearly still not based on boiling. The scale isn't based on something if the number that thing happens at is 212°. Even 200 is just ugly.
The scale should've been redone once that got sorted out, ancient communications standards be damned. Even just forgiving that, it should've been tossed out in favor of a cleaner method immediately. Keeping that filth is just unconscionable.
If scales shouldn't be arbitrary then a temperature measurement system that picked the state change of fresh water at atmosphereic pressure where you find a bunch of salt water which has a different state change temperature, might be just slightly arbitrary. Kelvin trys to fix it by moving the zero to eliminate negatives, but doesn't change the scale making all the other temperatures arbitrary.
Metric is great, as long as humans are living on Earth. Any other planet or a major change to the atmosphere or Sea level and everyone is going to be why did they pick such random points. Luckily nothing is happening to change the atmosphere or Sea level on Earth so nothing to worry about.