| I want to be careful, this could get holy war-ish... So I do not want to sell anyone on changing their view. This isn't advocacy. But just want to provide one illustration of why someone may prefer Fahrenheit. When I travel, hotel rooms generally let me alter the temperature on digital thermostats by one degree. In the US, that's great, that's plenty of precision. In Europe, I lose fidelity and am strictly worse off. If people like a room set at 71 degrees, they don't like 72 or 70. If they like it at 75, they aren't secretly shooting for 76. When I'm cooking in an oven or sous vide, I often want to tweak controls very precisely in an attempt to balance the carmelization of sugars or the rendering of fats while leaving proteins or starches intact. Room temps, weather, and cooking are the ways I mainly interact with these scales. In each of them, the precision of the base unit in F is strictly advantageous to me. Celsius can absolutely allow greater granularity, if everyone used an extra significant digit as a rule. I blame psychology though, people and systems often just don't bother to think that way. I wholly support the metric system to unify measurement across different scales. That's neat. But as I rarely need to talk about millidegrees or gigadegrees, it seems less relevant to me in this context. |
Your comment about psychology is actually just you mistaking familiarity with your temperature system with something more universal. In countries where we use metric/Celsius, we find decimals super easy to think in because we’re used to doing it!