I'm largely indifferent about whether imperial or metric should be used as the standard system of units. Admittedly it would be a lot easier if the whole world stuck to one system of measurements so that we didn't have to worry about converting units correctly, and we wouldn't have had that head-desk situation with the Mars probe, but that doesn't prove one system is 'superior'. In fairness, you could make a very similar 'argument' about different languages, different currencies, different electrical plugs et cetera that would be just as arbitrary. Personally, I think the fact that there's an argument about which system is superior says a lot more about the decimal system than anything else, but virtually no one is proposing a transition to uncial or hexadecimal. In any case, what I'm about to say is not an attack on the 'metric system' as such, just the way it is commonly abused by metric users.
When I go to objectively measure how much my figure has changed over Christmas, I use a weighing scale with two choices of scale: the imperial scale (stones & pounds) and the metric scale (kilogrammes). My weight is the force exerted on me by the Earth's gravity. I get that the weighing scale is not measuring my mass directly, but infers it by assuming I'm weighing myself on the Earth. Taking it to the Moon wouldn't be fair because it wasn't designed for that purpose. I'll even concede that my mass is probably more important to my health than how I interact with the Earth. To quote Cree in the Little Dinosaur Adventure, "There's no need to bite my head off".
No, my problem is that most people seem to think these two scales are measuring along the same dimension, leading to confused statements such as "I weigh 80 kilogrammes" or "I've put on weight", and then I'm accused of pedantry when I explain that they do not. The mentality seems to be that there are two types of people in the world: those that don't know the distinction but can nevertheless function, and those that need to understand it and do because it's fairly elementary Newtonian Mechanics.
It's possible this mindset will change when the common person regularly travels in space to other worlds, but I've already heard some people say that the kilogramme can be understood as a unit of force if it is understood as an 'Earth equivalent', i.e. a force equivalent to that exerted on a kilogramme of mass due to gravity on the Earth's surface. That's just perfect; now I have to judge which use of 'kilogramme' is being used based on the context, as if English wasn't already full of ambiguities that distract attention away from the intended message. If I was being really, really fair I'd concede that 'natural units' systems are commonly used in physics, but that actually does serve a legitimate purpose of removing pesky constants from physics equations. What purpose does an 'Earth equivalent kilogramme' serve? We already have a metric unit of force called the 'Newton', one that isn't (quite as) Earth-centric.
When I first heard about this distinction between mass & weight as a student, I conceded my mistake and immediately tried to correct my language from that point. I genuinely do not get why people try to 'push back' and defend the use of sloppy language when it is pointed out to them. Does the truth just not interest or matter to you? People who say they don't like arguments seem very good at perpetuating them. Stop misusing language and I'll stop complaining. (:
The distinction might not seem to matter on face value, but it's unnecessarily confusing to children (or even adults) taking an interest in the subject for the first time. It's a bad move to first give them inaccurate information that they have to 'unlearn'. I also don't think it's an accident that a lot of Flat Earth advocates or sympathisers believe that things just fall because they're 'heavy' or 'dense'. They're genuinely confused about these concepts, and honestly I don't entirely blame them.
As a final note, yes I am sorry for that title. Please accept this cookie as a token of apology. 🍪
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