Comment by mrtksn
5 days ago
I wonder if Americans don't have a mental image for measurement units so that they alway use some physical object as a reference. Sure, its useful to use a common object as a reference but I don't see that much often in other places.
Most people usually understand what it means something to be 20 meters, 5kg or 2 liters intuitively. Like, when I hear that something is 60m tall I intuitively think if it as 20 story apartment building and don't benefit from the extra info about how this is like 18 elephants stacked on each other.
I guess you're in the minority here. In Germany, everything Remotely large will be measured in football fields or "Saarlands".
I'm also European and don't get these olympic swimming pool or whatever comparisons. I'd have to look up how many m3 of water they contain or what's the length/depth in meters are to make sense of it.
Newspapers in my country don't make these silly comparisons.
But yeah, to be fair, when hearing about Starship I had to look up our TV tower height to identify whether Starship is taller or not. It disappointed me that it's not.
Yeah, height is easier to grasp when correlating in terms of x story apartment buildings.
Don't forget to mention the inofficial units for fluid volumes being "Badewannen" and "Schubkarren".
Can’t forget the Olympic sized swimming pools!
Whats the speed of light in football field terms?
Approximately 7 708 937 142 soccer fields per half time.
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What's the difference between 18 elephants stacked versus a building with 20 stories? They are just different analogies.
Yes I'm always a bit dumbfounded by this behavior as well. They always use weird stuff and I never have the intuition of the actual size, especially since the definition can vary depending on context.
In this case, what is actually considered to be a small dog? To me it would be something that is close to the size of a cat but since it's about 13kg, it can't be that small, so that's more like a medium dog (I'm not certain, but I have a feeling that if you lay out things statistically this is what you would end up with). On the other hand, 13kg is very easy to get, that's just 13 liters of water, and it's quite easy to make a mental image for both volume and weight "feeling" that way.
American units feel so impressive and random, it is the reason they always add those weird comparisons but often they make it even worse.
Which is strange, since one of their measurement units is literally based on a body part.
Americans do not do metric. Americans can’t even balance a checkbook. Hence the small dog reference for mental “clarity”. We’re dumb. Just look at the news…
I don't think it's fair to insult all US citizens because of your personal shortcomings.
I think it may be fair? This guy[1] explains how surplus of corporate profits are a mirror image of household/govt debt. Which is a direct transfer of wealth from everyone to the super-super-rich (not the 1%, but the 0.1 - 0.01%)
[1] The chart below shows how this works. The blue line at the top shows the “surplus” of corporations: corporate income minus expenses and net investment. We know this as corporate “free cash flow.” The red line shows combined “surplus” of other sectors: government, households, and foreign trading partners – in excess of their consumption and net investment. It’s negative, so in aggregate, they’re running a deficit. That deficit is the mirror image of the corporate surplus. This isn’t an accident. It’s just accounting (I’ve excluded a few tiny items for clarity): https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc251028/
Statistics my man, statistics. I’m not saying there aren’t smart Americans that can grok a 10kg bag, but that the vast majority can not.
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Do you not have personal experience with people under 40 in America? I would bet $20 over 95% of them don't know how to balance a check book.
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No, Americans are numerically illiterate.
Which is why all the dumbest Americans insist that "Why didn't they teach us how to balance a check book?", while, well, they were taught that, and every single check book comes with clear and simple instructions for its use
They were also taught how to calculate loan details and the extreme power of how interest grows, but they were too busy crying "Oh this is lame, when am I ever going to use this?"
There's a cult of proud ignorance in the US. People will brag about being uneducated, illiterate, or unable to follow simple instructions.
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Sure but don't they have a mental image for 80 feet for example? Why articles will almost always include something like "that like 50 chairs put next to each other" when length is mentioned.
I would say most American's sense of feet gets fuzzy after about 30, there are very few things that are standardized that size or bigger or that they have ever personally measured out. Yards might be more useful up to maybe 200 or 300 because they have all seen football fields though. After that for most people they go to miles or minutes of travel.
Some farmers might throw in a reference to an acre length that is referencing the 660 foot length of a standard acre (660 feet x 66 feet, or 1 furlong x 1 chain), which is just another way to say 1/8th of a mile.
If you were to say 100 yards, we could. That’s a football field (American football played with your… hands).
Because people in the south don’t even know the imperial system… it’s bad. They say things like “Take the road there yonder and when you see the white church, turn right, go a ways until you get to the dirt road…”
Anything outside of what they have with them, they don’t have a clue or can’t imagine it accurately. Small dog reference, there’s millions of Americans with a small dog so most just looked to their pooch when this came up. Same as if you were to say something like 50 cars. They would look outside to their Toyota Corolla and imagine 50 of them. It’s like talking to grown toddlers sometimes but that have full grown emotional states not under control. Not everyone is like this but a good 50-60% of Americans are. Just look for the Lululemon.
I know that 1kg is about 2.2lbs but that still doesn't give me the "mental clarity" of what 20kg is unless I do the conversion.
At the gym I use the pound plates and not the kilo ones. I intuitively know what the difference between 135 and 225 lbs feels like, and I don't have that same intution for kg.
All that said, I don't find the "small dog" types of analogies for weight very useful. Why not just use the same number of characters (or less) to give the weight in the other popular unit?
Europeans don't even know what it means to "balance a checkbook", so they must be dumber.
Yeah but ya’ll have estates…
It helps to understand that the only freedom Americans only cared for (and the only freedom they have left from the looks of it) is the freedom to choose standards of measurement and vocabulary. This will provide historical context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk (Washington's Dream - SNL)
Huh? Britons get locked up for social media posts. Most of the world doesn’t have guns. And among the first world we’re the only ones free to go bankrupt from medical bills!
Our problems don’t stem from lack of freedom, they stem from too much of it.
> Most of the world doesn’t have guns.
No guns, but they have solar panels, batteries, EVs, etc.
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