Comment by metaphor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metaphor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> This is a terrible indictment of the American schooling system if your only defence against metrication is 'I can't do decimals'. It is you lot who have to catch up.

To the contrary, if you read into the full context of this thread, the underlying contention isn't that we're incompetent at decimal arithmetic, but that the rest of the world (and apparently some Americans too) believes our common fractional arithmetic is too much of a mental burden, and I don't blame those individuals either.

Indeed decimal arithmetic is trivial to most grown adults, but that wasn't the point; the example was merely to highlight how just slightly changing a few numbers in the same sequence of operations serves as an effective counterpoint to the grandparent's assertion that "even children can do in their head reliably".

Americans are taught and handle metric units in compulsory school just fine, but most of us also practice imperial units on a daily basis as well. We're just not culturally predisposed to complain when everyone else conveys measure in the SI mks/cgs framework.

> common fractional arithmetic

I agree with the current of the thread, that mixed numbers are decidedly inferior to decimals. They're not harder, strictly speaking, but are more tedious, and this additional tedium introduces steps that people can make mistakes in. Fractions are also not easily parsed by standard desk calculators, and are not easily printed in a single line. They may even be mistaken by someone in a hurry as three separate numbers.

Decimals do away with all this unnecessary pain, and this really is the key point of metrication: it is a waste of time and effort to use non-SI units and convert back and forth or deal with mixed numbers. That's what people are complaining about: it is exasperating when Americans dredge mediæval units up in the 21st century, when we have a modern, simple, and unified system of units available.

> ...mixed numbers are decidedly inferior to decimals. They're not harder, strictly speaking, but are more tedious, and this additional tedium introduces steps that people can make mistakes in.

A counterpoint to this is the fact that there are close to a million employed carpenter tradesmen in the US whose average level of education is a high school diploma[1], and yet their trade operates almost exclusively on fractional arithmetic, most of which occurs mentally on the jobsite.

The point being that tedium is a relative measure of training and experience, and it goes without saying that those trained in only decimal form are liable to struggle with unfamiliar systems.

And if you think that's bad, try purchasing lumber from any lumber yard in Canada or the US; the trade's board-foot system[2] will really tickle your metric attachment.

> it is a waste of time and effort to use non-SI units and convert back and forth.

It seems the story is more like it's a waste of time to those who find value in what Americans have to say but are unaccustomed and insistently resistant to performing conversions. I don't disagree that there's certainly value in having a globally common measurement framework, and indeed an American who conveys imperial units in a European setting is liable to be chastised. But old habits die hard and last time I checked, we're not having this discussion on a .eu gTLD.

Now try imagining how the typical American feels when engaging with the rest of the world: SI units, (,) and (.) symbols reversed, left-lane driving, etc. We tend to just adapt.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/carpente...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_foot

It’s baffling to me how you twist and turn the perfectly clear explanation of the parent poster into some convoluted argument in favor of imperial units. Essentially, it boils down to ”we’ve always done it this way, we don’t mind pointless busywork, and doing stuff different to everyone else is a good thing“.

Sounds like a personal issue.

Tell you what, just keep it on that side of the Atlantic and continue buying our natural gas, and since we're so biased to a fault towards "we've always done it this way", we'll keep buying your most excellent products that conform to Reinheitsgebot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com