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Comment by nilaykumar | Hacker News Reader

I still find it hard to see any practical, hard benefits of switching to tau. Perhaps you could argue that many things become "more natural" but at this point, pi is ingrained in mathematics, and it works perfectly well. I just can't imagine that switching to tau would allow us to reap any benefits that were previously inaccessible. I don't think there's any reason to fix what ain't broke.

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I think the strongest argument is pedagogical. If tau makes the underlying concepts clearer (and I believe it does), then it makes sense to use it when teaching beginners.

This is a dangerous argument—sure, if (I did say 'if'!) it's a win for the beginners, then why not expose them to it when there's no baggage dragging them back?; but, on the other hand, in that case, in exchange for short-term gains you're giving them a long-term loss of ability to communicate with others who weren't taught that way.

(Essentially the same argument can apply to innovation; it doesn't mean that innovation is bad, just that it is rarely without cost.)

> a long-term loss of ability to communicate with others who weren't taught that way.

I'm not sure that the difference between pi and tau is severe enough to cause a communication problem. Conversion is trivial and anyone familiar with one can learn to convert to the other in about ten seconds.

Existing problems with conversion from older systems into metric make a pi<->tau conversion insignificant - and even then people manage to deal with it just fine.

I think their main point is not to switch to tau but to allow it in answers. I like the attitude.

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