It seems like a weird point to bring up. How often do y’all convert your measurements? It’s not even a daily thing. If I’m measuring something, I either do it in inches, or feet, rarely yards. I’ve never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can’t imagine I’m unique in this. When I have needed to, it’s usually converting down (I.e. 1/3 of a foot), which imperial does handle better in more cases.
Like. I don’t care if we switch, I do mostly use metric personally, it just seems like a weird point to be the most common pro-metric argument when it’s also the one I’m least convinced by due to how metric is based off of base 10 numbering, which has so many problems with it.
Edit: After reading/responding a lot in the comments, it does seem like there’s a fundamental difference in how distance is viewed in metric/imperial countries. I can’t quite put my finger on how, but it seems the difference is bigger than 1 mile = 1.6km
Honestly it always has felt a little weird that they go from the rough equivalent to inches, right to the rough equivalent to yards. Like. Decimeters makes sense to me. Idk why it doesn’t get used
Well, specifically because the conversions are so trivial, decimeters aren’t inherently more useful than specifying tens of centimeters. And with measurements of smaller lengths, you usually do need centimeter precision, so 57cm is simpler than 5.7dm or 5dm 7cm.
Well, and sometimes you also need millimeters, so 57.5cm is still conceptually simpler (57½cm) than 5.75dm.
All these combined mean that centimeters end up being used much more often. And then decimeters fell out of use even where it would still be a fitting unit (8dm instead of 80cm), because our brains work in patterns and will retain those patterns better that are used/trained more often.
I know conceptually what decimeters are, but if you tell me something is 8dm long, it does take a splitsecond for me to mentally convert that into 80cm, which is where all my brain’s patterns have been trained on. I have an intuition what “80cm” looks like in the real world, whereas I don’t for “8dm”, not without mentally converting it to cm.
Yeah, and it’s a bit strange, because conceptually I have two different feelings about 36 inches, 3 feet, and 1 yard. They’re the same measurement, but they feel different somehow?