Whether or not water freezes has a lot of effects on the weather. When deciding whether to walk about a frozen lake the amount of days that the weather was below 0 matters. For gardering it matters whether the soil freezes.
This is a good point; using 0 as a reference point for freezing, which does have real life applications (is it going to snow? will this morning's rain cause icy roads? etc.) is much less arbitrary than how it's used on the Fahrenheit scale. I suppose boiling has cooking applications as well?
The granularity point is interesting; in the US, setting a building's thermostat to 68 degrees Fahrenheit vs. 66 degrees Fahrenheit is typically considered a pretty non-arbitrary decision as far as saving money vs. gaining comfort goes. Now that I actually stop and think about it though, if you asked me to guess what temperature a building I'm currently in's thermostat was set at, I'm not sure I'd actually be able to tell you.
In fact, I'm not sure I could even consistently guess what temperature the air around me is without being at least 5 degrees Fahrenheit off. Now that you point it out to me, less granularity probably makes life a bit simpler.
Am I crazy for thinking that Fahrenheit is a way more user-friendly system than Celsius when it comes to everyday life? 0 (very cold) to 100 (very hot) is superior to -20 (very cold) to 40 (very hot) both in having more granularity with its whole numbers and being a nice round range to deal with. Also, "Below 0" sounds way cooler (pun intended) than "Below -20."
Whenever I bring this up to any friends of mine, their immediate counterargument is "But almost every single other country in the world uses Celsius!", which obviously doesn't contradict my point at all.
Are there any actual good arguments in favor of Celsius? The temperature at which water freezes and boils just seems like such an arbitrary thing to go off of.
What makes for a crony belief is how we're rewarded for it. And the problem with beliefs about climate change is that we have no way to act on them — by which I mean there are no actions we can take whose payoffs (for us as individuals) depend on whether our beliefs are true or false. The rare exception would be someone living near the Florida coast, say, who moves inland to avoid predicted floods. (Does such a person even exist?) Or maybe the owner of a hedge fund or insurance company who places bets on the future evolution of the climate. But for the rest of us, our incentives come entirely from other people, from the way they judge us for what we believe and say. And thus our beliefs about climate change are little more than hot air (pun intended).
For those who actually want to affect climate change with their actions, this kinda goes hand-in-hand with the idea that stating your goals before you start working on them sabotages you due to getting social credit without having to do anything. Maybe the most useful beliefs should be kept private?
Then again, it's important to spread correct ideas too, and that can't happen if we all stayed shut up about it. Talking about climate change might honestly be the most impactful thing a lot of people are capable of (practically) doing. As much as I like to get bitter about hashtag activism, I don't think we can ignore that it's probably had at least some positive effects, even if they're not optimal for as much effort as people put into yelling on the internet.
I have! Wish I'd gotten in on the initial astronaut selection, haha. Still, my money is on SpaceX beating them to the punch.
Hey everybody! My name's Trent, and I'm a computer science student and hobbyist game developer who's been following LessWrong for a while. Finished reading the sequences about a year ago (after blazing through HPMOR and loving it) and have lurked here (and on Weird Sun Twitter...!) since then. Figured I'd make an account and get more involved in the community; reading stuff here makes me more motivated in my studies, and it's pretty entertaining either way!
I'd love to be one of the first people on Mars. Not sure how realistic that goal is or what steps I should even take to make it happen beyond saving $500,000 for a supposed SpaceX ticket and mastering a useful skill (coding!), but it's something to shoot for!
Looking forward to reading the linked posts, I haven't seen a lot of them! Also, is this the newest Welcome thread? It's over a year old...!
I'm reading through Strategy of Conflict right now and am really enjoying it. I hope he lived a good life.