[NoImmatureAdHom]

Everybody's shitting on Imperial, U.S. customary, or whatever you want to call them units...

Allow me to give a slightly different perspective: as a scientist, if I'm doing chemistry then metric is the way to go. Conversions are easier, centigrade and Kelvin just make a lot more sense...

But for many day-to-day things I think the Imperial units are better. Temperature? Fahrenheit is a 0-100 scale, where 0 is pretty much as cold as it gets in temperate climates, and 100 is pretty much as hot as it gets. A mile is 5280 feet? Wtf? Well, it's 1000 paces (each pace bringing you back to the same state, so two steps = 5.28 feet).

I don't know if any good work has been done on it, but my guess is people who were raised with inches are better and quicker at estimating length than people who were raised with metric. Millimeters are too small, cm are also too small (and nobody uses them really). Inches are a good, intuitive unit for measuring human-scale stuff given our cognitive constraints, I'd guess.

Does anyone know of work looking at this?

[Dayshine]

As a counterpoint: I find the implicit imprecision caused by having poor/no divisibility a constant frustration in my day-to-day life.

For volume: US based recipes very often resort to "1 cup", and I generally find they're rounding a long way from... say... 3/4 cup. In metric, people don't tend to round more than 10ml at a time, so you'll see 120ml, not 100ml when they mean 120ml.

For distance: "About an inch" is the most useless instruction in DIY or crafting.

People seem to be very reluctant to use the awkward and 3 fifths or w/e you end up with in imperial.

When you say "people are better at estimating", are you adjusting for the reduced precision?

[NoImmatureAdHom]

> When you say "people are better at estimating", are you adjusting for the reduced precision?

No, I wasn't thinking about it that way. I was imagining a task where you get people to estimate the length of various objects by looking at them, and just take the mean error. So the size of the units wouldn't matter. If someone wanted to say 1.33268 inches, I'd let them.

Concerning divisability: it depends on how you think about it. Many people found dividing in half, and half again, etc. to be intuitive, and it is intuitive in e.g. woodworking (because physically dividing in half is easy), but yeah...in a lot of applications I just want to be able to move decimal points around.

For volume in recipes: you're right. I think the problem with the U.S. here is that we use volume in recipes at all. Weight! Use weight! Flour is many different densities... But yeah, recipes are in general trash. For your case, you'll usually see cups and tablespoons (...lol) like "1 cup plus 2 tablespoons".

For distance: "about an inch" makes a lot of sense to people raised with inches. It doesn't strike me as weird at all.

Concerning awkward 3 fifths: imperial wouldn't use fifths, it'd be divisions by two. So half, quarter, eighth, etc. There are some specific cases, like a bottle of liquor is often called a "fifth" because it's approximately a fifth of a gallon, but that's specific to that application.

[Bayart]

French perspective here : everybody uses centimeters and millimeters are common. I just came from a hair cut and the girl doing it asked for my clipper size in millimeters. I have an intuition, and it's usually pretty close, for how much à millimeter, centimeter, meter and kilometer are. All that to say it's got everything to do with habit and not random size body parts.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

What I'm curious about is whether people raised with the metric system and nothing else are more accurate in estimating e.g. lengths than people raised primarily with Imperial / U.S. customary.

So we do an experiment where we have people look at, and maybe handle, random objects and then ask them to estimate the length. Does imperial / metric make a difference? My guess is no, but I have significant probability weight on yes...maybe 20%. And wouldn't that be cool!

[orwin]

I think you can go look at sociological experiment about crowd estimation, you might find a response: while those experiment are mostly done in the US, they are often replicated in metric countries. (i don't have any clues about the response to be honest)

[BrandoElFollito]

I am French (so strictly SI) and an ex physicist (so I like powers of 10). And I agree with you, especially for the temperature, and generally speaking for anything related to everyday life.

I think however that we must have only one referential because it simply makes things difficult when communicating (similar to currency rates). We should have chosen °F for temperature because they are more optimal (no changes for science, easier in everyday life) but metric for distances and weights.

Distances and weights are often added, which is a problem for non metric units. We all remember the train starting from one city at 13:45 and the other at 9:12 and the time they meet. Super simple in metrics, super hard in train time.

[deadbunny]

Pretty sure you're just more used to/think in imperial beacause that's what you've used all your life. I can estimate metric perfectly fine.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

I've used both. But it's going to feel "perfectly fine" to everyone! That's why we need an experiment to answer the question.

[sebazzz]

It is not like a foot is as long as your foot, and a yard is as long as your garden.

[soneil]

The temperature thing is just whichever you're more used to using. We almost never see 30F or 70F, so the idea that it's a natural fit is rather forced.