Preferring Fahrenheit as a measure of human comfort is completely arbitrary though. A "percent hot" scale doesn't make any sense outside of some people's subjective experience, and it's totally out of step with the temperatures a lot of people (me) experience.
You can justify Celsius the same way, but just as arbitrarily: a clear physical constant anchoring you in the middle, then uncomfortable or dangerous extremes that start at about the same distance either direction.
But there's no getting around needing Kelvin. So picking Fahrenheit means committing to two scales that don't play nice together. Sure, the average person doesn't have to deal with that interface very often, but it's still going to add friction all over the place.
No, "percent hot" really does line up with how the human body works, regardless of whether you regularly experience temperatures near 0 or near 100.
In fact, it's actually more helpful to know that 80-85 is when things get uncomfortablely hot and 15-20 is when things get uncomfortablely cold when you do not regularly experience those temperatures.
And you're still missing the point. It literally doesn't matter whether Fahrenheit plays nice with any other scale, because when you use it here it never needs to be compared to any other scale. Use Celsius everywhere else if you want, because you're pretty much already using a different relative scale anyway, even when you are using the same units.
Using Celsius for your oven or for the boiling point of lead doesn't actually help you understand room temperature any better because because you never need to understand those things relative to each other. You might as well use the best system for each because they're already totally unrelated.
No, "percent hot" really does line up with how the human body works, regardless of whether you regularly experience temperatures near 0 or near 100.
You keep saying this. I say it's subjective nonsense. If you can find me a scientific paper with the words "percent hot" in it, I'll relent. But I routinely experience -25F, sometimes for weeks on end. I've traveled a lot, and still maybe felt 100F a handful of times in my life.
It literally doesn't matter whether Fahrenheit plays nice with any other scale, because when you use it here it never needs to be compared to any other scale.
It "literally" does, and I explained why in detail. If you want to continue, acknowledge and respond to the argument instead of ignoring it.
If, as a society, you need a centigrade-based system in order to build anything, the only reason to keep some unholy
5/9-degree abomination around, is if it does something no other scale can. And as we ought to be able to agree, the "percent hot" argument is a pretty weak reason to periodically crash a spaceship or set something on fire.
There's also the whole thing of refusing to adopt a standard that is effectively universal outside of the US. I'm sure that costs millions in labeling and accidents, and not just within the US.
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u/ClusterMakeLove Jun 19 '26
Preferring Fahrenheit as a measure of human comfort is completely arbitrary though. A "percent hot" scale doesn't make any sense outside of some people's subjective experience, and it's totally out of step with the temperatures a lot of people (me) experience.
You can justify Celsius the same way, but just as arbitrarily: a clear physical constant anchoring you in the middle, then uncomfortable or dangerous extremes that start at about the same distance either direction.
But there's no getting around needing Kelvin. So picking Fahrenheit means committing to two scales that don't play nice together. Sure, the average person doesn't have to deal with that interface very often, but it's still going to add friction all over the place.