Comment on Burning Up
Mrs_deWinter@feddit.org 1 week agoOriginally 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.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
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.
Mrs_deWinter@feddit.org 1 week ago
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.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
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 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.
Mrs_deWinter@feddit.org 6 days ago
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 “without further explanation”.
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.