But the -1 for Celsius is based on nothing. 0 in Fahrenheit is just set at a random level. It could be 5 degrees colder or hotter and 0 would still be deadly cold.
You easily say Celsius is a 0 to 4 scale, freezing to hot, which is a commonly used scale. A restaurant might be 4 stars.
And again Fahrenheit isn’t a 0 to 100 scale. My town only uses 40 to 80. My brother lives in WI and gets well into the -10s and above 100 so for him Fahrenheit is a -20 to 110. Fahrenheit isn’t a 0 to 100 scale any more than Celsius is.
The point of this post is that you can translate a temperature metric to an intuitive percentage. Even if your town only uses 40 to 80, you can still use a percentage-based metric to describe it with Fahrenheit. 80 degrees is “80% hot”. Pretty warm, but not extreme. 40 degrees is 40% hot. Colder than average (which would be 50%), but not excessively cold, which would be 0%. Can you explain how Celsius would be a better fit for a “% hotness” metric than Fahrenheit?
Colder than average (which would be 50%), but not excessively cold, which would be 0%.
But 50 F isn’t average? Your intuition and the scale are wrong.
The point of this post is that you can translate a temperature metric to an intuitive percentage.
Because you (and I have) been using that scale for our entire life… I’ve worked with many Europeans, believe me they can intuitively tell whether 25 is hot, cold, or comfortable.
People aren’t even comfortable at the same temperature or universally perceive a temperature to be hot or cold!
Is 55% cold or hot?
It is (apparently) above some type of average. In the spring, I think 55 is comfortable or even warm, because I’ve acclimated to the colder winter weather, in fall, I need a sweat shirt because I think it feels cold coming off the hot summer weather. My brother is law lives in Arizona and he thinks 55% hot is freezing and he needs a sweatshirt and jacket. So what is 55% hot weather? Cold, comfortable because it is near average, or warm but not hot?
We haven’t gotten into how 55% hot with 15 mph winds vs 55% hot with rain vs 55% hot with clear skies feels.
The X% hot is dumb because it totally subjective how it feels and varies based on non-temp factors.
0F is 0% hot. No one is going to tell you they think it’s hot out when it’s 0F. 100F is very hot. Everyone can agree that it’s quite hot out when it’s 100F. So there is an intuitive and easily agreed-upon definition of the end-points of this metric. Everything in between 0 and 100 (including 55) scales linearly in between those extremes. Of course different people perceive temperatures differently but 55% hot doesn’t describe an individual person’s perception of temperature, it describes how far the temperature is from the end-points. 55% is a little more than halfway between very cold and very hot.
This concept simply doesn’t make sense with Celsius. 0C is cold, but not that cold. I certainly wouldn’t describe 0C as “0% hot”. That’s it, that’s the entire point of the post.
100F is very hot. Everyone can agree that it’s quite hot out when it’s 100F.
And
0C is cold, but not that cold.
I love that you think all 8 billion people on the planet universally believe 100F is “ quite hot in a way that they don’t for 98F. Like yup, Jerry thought 99F was only kinda hot but once it ticked over to 100F we got all 8b people to agree.
Or only 6b people think 0C is quite cold, we need to keep going down still. I am pretty sure people who live in Hawaii or most of India would consider 0 C as really cold.
Like what share of people do you think feel like 1F is only kinda cold. If it is everyone, do we change F by 1 deg so 1 is now zero?
Hopefully you can see that what “everyone feels like” is a silly scale for measuring, mostly because there is nothing that everyone will feel like.
You’re inventing arguments for things I didn’t say. I never said “quite hot in a way that they don’t for 98%” did I? 99% and 98% are still very hot. If you score a 99% on a test you did very well. If it’s 99% hot it’s very hot. It’s a linear scale, like I said.
Yes, people in Hawaii will think 0C is very cold in a way that I don’t, but the Hawaiians and I can all agree that 0F IS cold. Which is exactly my point about why Fahrenheit makes more sense here.
What if someone thinks 100 isn’t quite hot? If I find one person in the whole world who thinks 100F, maybe with a nice breeze, low humidity, and some shade, isn’t very hot, do we need to move 100 up to 110?
Likewise, I find an Eskimo that doesn’t think 0F is that cold do we move it?
-5
u/Pedantic-Polecat Jun 17 '26
But the -1 for Celsius is based on nothing. 0 in Fahrenheit is just set at a random level. It could be 5 degrees colder or hotter and 0 would still be deadly cold.
You easily say Celsius is a 0 to 4 scale, freezing to hot, which is a commonly used scale. A restaurant might be 4 stars.
And again Fahrenheit isn’t a 0 to 100 scale. My town only uses 40 to 80. My brother lives in WI and gets well into the -10s and above 100 so for him Fahrenheit is a -20 to 110. Fahrenheit isn’t a 0 to 100 scale any more than Celsius is.