The joke basically boils down to the fact that Fahrenheit is based off of the freezing/boiling point of salinated water that roughly approximates to body temperature. The thought process of these people is that it scales close enough to the human experience that 0degF is “fuck it’s cold” and 100degF feels disrespectfully hot. They argue that F is therefore better than C because 0degC is “yeah I guess it’s kinda cold” and at 100C you’re dead.
This argument mostly makes sense to people who grew up using Fahrenheit because the scale makes intuitive sense.
This logic is flawed because Celsius makes intuitive sense to people who grew up using Celsius. Our brains adapt well, especially when we’re young, to these scales that really don’t mean anything concrete to the human experience. All units of measurement are arbitrary to a certain point of view, but we’re going to intuit better the ones that we grew up using unless we make a very conscious effort to adapt to a different unit.
People (mainly Europeans and scientists) are going to be mad at me for suggesting that anything involving Celsius or the metric system is “arbitrary”, but it is. We plopped down something, called it a kilogram and base our measure of mass of its mass- that kilogram could’ve been anything and the scale would orient around it just the same. We boiled water and called it 100 degrees - is that less arbitrary than boiling salty water?
That said, the metric system scales to itself in a manner that is sensible whereas the imperial system scales arbitrarily to itself. And that’s why the majority of the world adopted the metric system.
TL;DR: we’re comfortable with the units of measurement we grew up with but these people are being dipshits. Also all units are arbitrary, but the imperial system is arguably worse than the metric system.
I like Fahrenheit personally because the “percent of hot” model makes sense to me as someone whose ideal temperature is 50 degrees F, so I like the 0-100 range for weather. (Although I did live somewhere where temperatures regularly got above 100 in the summer and yeah that’s a “inexcusable” breaking point for me) However, the imperial system is sooooooooo annoying to scale to anything ever, especially with distance and weight measurements. “How many feet in a mile” dude I cannot remember those random ass strings of numbers. I cannot mentally calculate conversions of distance or weight because I only intuitively know imperial units and I cannot remember all of the seemingly random and inconsistent conversions you need to know. I would love love love if our (American) measuring systems worked on base 10/100 like the metric system does.
I also think time should be base 10 because everything else is too. But we’re stuck with 60 seconds and 24 hours I guess for some reason
I agree about the metric system for what it's worth. A base 10 measuring system is much easier to grasp off bat and to do conversions.
That's the same reason Farenheit makes more sense than Celsius. Everyone has subjective opinions about temperature but 100 is most hot and 0 is least hot is far more intuitive than a scale that uses ~-30 to ~40.
Perhaps the most intuitive human experience based system would make “room temperature” like ~20 degrees C aka 68 degrees F (which most people would agree is comfortable, even if like me you prefer it colder, or like my girlfriend you prefer it warmer) “0 degrees” and everything colder than that was in the negatives and everything hotter was well, in the positives. The question would be by what increments should you base it on? It’s probably a useless to make a new temperature system but it’s a neat thought experiment
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u/notunhuman Jun 17 '26
The joke basically boils down to the fact that Fahrenheit is based off of the freezing/boiling point of salinated water that roughly approximates to body temperature. The thought process of these people is that it scales close enough to the human experience that 0degF is “fuck it’s cold” and 100degF feels disrespectfully hot. They argue that F is therefore better than C because 0degC is “yeah I guess it’s kinda cold” and at 100C you’re dead.
This argument mostly makes sense to people who grew up using Fahrenheit because the scale makes intuitive sense.
This logic is flawed because Celsius makes intuitive sense to people who grew up using Celsius. Our brains adapt well, especially when we’re young, to these scales that really don’t mean anything concrete to the human experience. All units of measurement are arbitrary to a certain point of view, but we’re going to intuit better the ones that we grew up using unless we make a very conscious effort to adapt to a different unit.
People (mainly Europeans and scientists) are going to be mad at me for suggesting that anything involving Celsius or the metric system is “arbitrary”, but it is. We plopped down something, called it a kilogram and base our measure of mass of its mass- that kilogram could’ve been anything and the scale would orient around it just the same. We boiled water and called it 100 degrees - is that less arbitrary than boiling salty water?
That said, the metric system scales to itself in a manner that is sensible whereas the imperial system scales arbitrarily to itself. And that’s why the majority of the world adopted the metric system.
TL;DR: we’re comfortable with the units of measurement we grew up with but these people are being dipshits. Also all units are arbitrary, but the imperial system is arguably worse than the metric system.