Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "Proč je metrický systém důležitý - Matt Anticole" video.

Steve Edwards First of all the differences in standards are costing millions due to issues when dealing with other countries in any way at all. Also, the metric system these days is based on constants that anyone can test themselves and agree upon so you don't need a particular standard in one particular location to check if your measure is correct or not. Like if you are measuring 5 feet with two different tools and they disagree what one would you trust? With a metric system you'd have an internationally agreed upon highly accurate way of determining just that. Then there's the logical relationship between the various metric units. If you learn one of them you can derive many of the other ones from that one. So I think it's actually easier to learn for kids, although I don't have evidence for that...
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Steve Edwards Well, when it comes to measurements conversions mistakes can cost lives. And unlike languages the measuring system has very little effect on what thoughts people are able to think. In other words, you can justify languages in that their differences genuinely enable thoughts that adds value. I'm not seeing inches and ounce doing that...
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Steve Edwards Different languages makes it easier or harder to express different ideas and concepts. English got an advantage there because of the number of words you've borrowed from other languages. That said, there's concepts that I can say in my own language in a single word that can't be expressed in English without a full sentence. And that's not the worst example either. There's concepts out there that can't be expressed in English nor my own language without pages of texts. This means that while the languages don't directly restrict what ideas we're able to hold they restrict what ideas we're easily able to express and share and therefore the interaction of thoughts between different people because no one language can ever express all thoughts and ideas as easily there will be differences not just in languages but in culture. And that opens up possibilities of new ideas to be created by people using one language and then learned by others using another one. Something I'm sure that a English speaker should be able to respect given how you can hold entire conversations without using a single word that you haven't loaned from another language at some point in time, conversations that generally are richer because of that even though you're also loosing out on some ideas due to the decreased popularity of the older less used words that these newer loan words sometimes replaces.
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Steve Edwards I don't, but you can't have good ideas without the bad ones. They're like genes and are subject to evolution, with the ideas that's the best suited for survival surviving and the ones less adapted to a particular situation dying out. And just like a population with a limited genetic variation tends to die out when subjected to environmental strain so does a population with a limited variety of ideas. Every single invention around you, math, computers, even fire was made by someone thinking differently from those around them, generally ideas that's based on other ideas that's either merged together or modified. Very few if any ideas at all are purely american or British, they all tend to build on other ideas by people in other nations if you follow the ideas history back far enough. Therefore we need new ideas, ideas being mixed and so one. The day we get uniformity of thoughts is the day we will die as a species... Anyway, why do you fear the unknown so much? Let me give you an example from the nordic languages of a word that you can't find an exact parallel to in English. "Lagom" That's the Swedish variant, we also got it in norwegian in the form of "luggum" for instance. Anyway, there's just not one word that fit it perfectly. I encourage you to go and google the word though. =) That word is a huge part of why the nordic region is the way it is, for better and worse.
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Well, the metric system is just another memeplex, so like other memes and memeplexes you can vote by acting just like everyone else. Of course that's exclusively your own vote, so you might want to campaign for the merits of that vote too to.
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Allison Koester You're already using two different systems already. Switching to metric would just involve all of you going to the same unit, because you're never going to get rid of metric in the US...
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