Do you consume american media and just shrug every time you see a number and go "oops there's no way I can understand this now" unless you use Google?
Also european here.
Pounds to kg... If it's written media, I just paste it to Google and get the conversion. If it's movies or shows, honestly I don't think I have found an instance while it actually matters at all. If a movie character says "Oh, no, I've gained 10 pounds in a month, I need to go on a diet" you know that they're sad because that's a non-negligible amount of weight, and knowing how much it exactly is doesn't affect understanding of the movie at all.
It's a similar situation to old novels talking about money... When you read a novel from 200 years ago talking about dollars, pounds or whatever, do you look at the historic inflation rate to check today's equivalence? You might, if you're a perfectionist, but the truth is that you can perfectly understand such novels without knowing that just by the context in which they mention money.
2.2 is good enough for most practical purposes, even 1 kg = 1 lbs isn’t that bad and it’s easier to calculate.
It’s like not knowing how many months are in a year…. I mean you don’t need to remember, but people will look at you funny if you’re constantly looking it up.
Right now I know pounds in a kilo because we're talking about it, but next time I encounter pounds in a context where the value is actually relevant might be years from now, and I'll probably have forgotten by then. Mentions in American media (which was what my parent poster was referring to) aren't enough to prime the memory and keep it fresh because they aren't relevant. If I hear in a show "I've gained 10 pounds", my mind just goes "Oh, they're unhappy because they gained some weight", I don't even stop to think how much a pound was.
Knowing common constants like the square root of 2 is 1.414, square root of 3 is 1.732, e is 2.718, etc isn't about the difficulty in looking them up it's about not needing to derail your thoughts by looking them up.
Everybody should learn CPR, hopefully taking a day every year for the class turns out to be a waste of time at the end of your life but I still encourage everybody to do it. Some people need to know what e is - but it turns out I haven't needed that since I got out of school (learning to use e was in general good for learning rigorous thinking, but no need to memorize e as that value was someplace in my notes when I needed it). There are obscure things I use all the time I have memorized - but they are specific to my job or hobbies.
Dismissing stuff as trivia doesn’t make that fundamental tradeoff go away. Do you need to know what 7 x 8 is, or the leader of China? No, but the cost of learning commonly used facts is far less than the non existent benefits of ignorance.
Perhaps different European countries are different here..
If a book/movie/whatever describes someone carrying a 60lb backpack is that a big deal? There's a big gap between a 6kg vs a 54kg one.
The cost of ignorance here isn't missing a question on a test, it's not getting the joke or similar in the moment thing.
Ignorance simply is a net loss no matter the subject. Token for example uses both furlong and league as a means of setting the settings tone, but also to convey information.
We can easily work out from the context what 60lb means. The precise figure is less relevant than the rest of the scene anyway — is a soldier carrying this backpack? An injured child?
All kinds of knowledge are relevant when reading a book. Is the backpack to be carried from Warsaw to Prague? Maybe I have a greater understanding of what that entails than you, even though I'm less sure about the 60lb.
That’s a judgement you can’t make because by your own admission you’re unaware of the subtleties involved.
That’s the core issue. It’s not that you can’t know what’s happening it’s that you’re assuming you do know what’s happening even when you’re missing significant elements and then in a fit of circular reasoning assuming because you don’t know it must not be important.
Clues embedded in a murder mystery, signs that someone was cheating, implications of fraud, etc etc all depend on concrete details you simply gloss over.
It's about as useful as knowing how many sickles in a galleon, or knuts in a sickle — 1 point gained in the trivia quiz!
No-one in Europe will "look at you funny" if you don't know the conversion, except maybe if you live in Britain and it's miles, feet, inches or pints.
Sickles in a galleon shows up in one franchise, inches shows up in millions.
Really is is just a measurement of how often you encounter facts. What you encounter often you cache and remember. Trivia you never use you don't.
As a 41 year old Norwegian, I have not encountered pounds often enough in my life to remember this fact.
It's not like I have ever used Google to convert either. It just isn't relevant. It is like..what is the currency of Malaysia? I really have no clue. Pounds is just something I almost never encounter.
Closest real use for pounds I can remember having I think was in "pound per square inch" pressure vs Newtons; but in that conversion there is so much else.
(Yes, before this thread I did have a vague sense. I would have said a pound was more than 200g and less than 800g I think.)
And that's despite being British, so it's conventionally used by normal people, and (when I was a kid) a common unit of measure for produce and recipes.
That is really enough for most reading. As another commenter said, you can read novels from the 70s involving dollars just fine without doing inflation adjustment to present value.
https://userscripts-mirror.org/scripts/show/130277
> Metric intervention Script Summary: Converting that old French system the Brits are still using to the metric standard of science. ~ foot, inch (00',00",00'00,00'00"), yard, mile, stone, Pound-mass/Lbs., Gallon ~ It will totally convert something heretical like: 1'23 1/4" x 2'12 5/8" into something ellegant and civilized like 89.535 cm x 93.0275 cm