47
Why do people who try to convince others to switch to metric focus so much on the conversions?
(herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol)
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
47 points (72.8% liked)
Ask Lemmy
37178 readers
1499 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's second nature in metric. All the time.
Judging by your post, it sounds like that's not the case in imperial. But you need to understand that especially converting between mm, cm, m, and km, for example, is not just extremely common, it's just normal. If you add up 10 times a 1000 meters, you don't call that 10000 meters, that would be awkward. You say it's 10 km.
We convert all the time, so that's why we assume the same must be the case in imperial and thus the easy conversions must be focused on because clearly they would get you to understand why metric is superior.
Tl;dr: I think the different imperial units represent a shift of scale that just doesn't happen in day to day life, given how different most of the common ones are.
Yeah, we largely... Don't? We're much more likely to 10x10 feet is 100 feet instead of 33 yard+1 foot. Even if we do go with something that ends on 99 feet I don't know anyone who would convert that to yards, even the GPS just says "In 200 feet turn right."
Anything above about 600 feet gets talked about in fractions of a mile. 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, etc, but if we're talking feet and go into that most would just stick with feet. 200+460 feet is 660 feet, not an eight of a mile, despite being an eighth of a mile.
If we're talking the "equivalent" to 10x1000 meters, we'd start talking about miles, not feet/yards xD I think it's because going from one unit to the other represents a shift in scale that just doesn't get run into frequently in day to day life? Because a yard is about a meter, 1 meter is about 7.5cm shorter, which is negligible for this discussion. A mile is 1,760 of those. I know that conversion because I'm a nerd, I doubt most people do, because it's not common enough in day to day life to need it. Land surveyors might, I'd assume they're more likely to know a lot of weirder ones, like feet to chains (66 feet), and maybe furlongs (10 chains) over the direct yard/miles conversion, since chains/furlongs were made for that profession, but I'm not, and don't know a surveyor so I can't say for sure.
I just don't believe you at all.
There are 12 inches in a foot. So the scale of a foot is 12x that of an inch.
There are 100cm in 1m. That is 100x.
Europeans convert cm to m very frequently, and it's a scale shift 10x larger than the one of inch-foot.
We also convert km to m frequently, which is a 1000x scale shift. It's more than half that of yard-mile.
The reason you don't convert often is because it is a pain in the ass to do so. Not the other way around.
The reason you say "an eight of a foot" has meaning, while "0.125 feet" does not. However, saying "125 meters" is way easier for both the listener and the talker than "an eighth of a kilometer". If it weren't, we'd say 1/8km, since nothing in metric prevents you from doing that.
A: I don't know what point you are trying to make. Could you clarify? To clarify on my part, nobody would say what you said. We would probably choose one of the following options:
Of course options 1 and 2 sound basically the same when spoken. And we wouldn't measure a human height to mm precision, so 1.68m, 1m 68cm, and 168cm.
B: ad hominem.