Anything that is familiar is easier, that tells you nothing about the thing itself. This seems so obvious to me I wouldn't even think of basing an argument around it. Is the concept of subjective experience that hard to imagine for some people?
I read something like 40% of Americans have never left their country, and about 10% have never left their own state. That means a great deal of them have never experienced a temperature outside of their own.
I think you may be intuitively underestimating the size of the US. I live in Arkansas, which is a fairly mid-sized state. Driving across it at highway speed (70mph/115kph) E/W or N/S takes about four hours. It’s slightly larger than England in area.
Consider someone who lives in Austin, TX. They could drive four hours in any direction and still be in Texas. The US as a whole is approximately the size of all of Europe.
Given that kind of scale, it seems illogical to say that many Americans have “never experienced a temperature outside of their own” merely because we tend to not travel internationally as often as others.
As for comfort zones - I think that’s something of a funny thing. I’ve been to Montreal a couple of times, and honestly felt more at ease there than when visiting New York City, Los Angeles, or Hawaii. There is a huge amount of diversity in terms of culture within the United States.
The other big factor is expense. My wife and I plan to visit Scotland and Italy at some point. We estimated that a week in Scotland for the two of us would cost about $7,000 - $5,000 of which is airfare alone! Consider that the median household income in the US is about $60,000 ($50,000 after federal income taxes). That week in Scotland is approximately the equivalent of two months’ income for a median household! In comparison, a round-trip flight from Heathrow to Istanbul is $330. It’s much, much cheaper for Europeans to travel internationally.
What does that even mean? You can experience temperatures ranging from 0°F to 100°F within six months in New York City. Why would you need to travel to experience different temperatures?
As someone who has grown up with a mix of various Imperial (not US) measures and metric ones, I often find some more intuitive than others even when I am familiar with both.
The most obvious his human height. A tall man is about 6' or more. Most people are some number of inches less than that. Moreover, the inch and not the centimetre is roughly the amount at which you would casually notice two people were slightly different in height.
On the other hand, for horizontal distance, metres (or yards) make more sense than feet. To the extent that when American tell me how far away something is in feet, I just multiply by three before trying to use the info.
I think weight in stones is similarly better than either kilos or or pounds, but I am personally more familiar with kilos.
This is what I though would be blindingly obvious, but apparently isn't.
Wouldn’t you divide (rather than multiply) by three to get the distance in yards, which would be closer to meters?
Though it's true, the alrgorithm for doing the multiplication happens to is `s/feet/yards/`