But then I grew up with Celsius, so no wonder I'm used to it!
People confuse familiarity with intuitiveness all the damn time. It's a recurring theme in OS "ease of use" superiority debates as well as metric vs imperial. And date, time or number formats. And road signs.
I would say the nice thing about the metric system is as long as you convert into a base unit (i.e. Meters, Seconds, etc) then you can easily convert stuff around. But you can't! Metric uses Kilograms not Grams all the time for things like Force (Kg *m/s^2). So I still have the same problem as imperial units ...
It's just whatever your familiar with.
A <kilo>gram is 1000 times a gram, it's written in the word. Are you serious when you say you can't easily multiply or divide by 1000?
A mile is 5280 feet. I can't just convert 231 miles into feet like that, and that's assuming I remember "5280".
> Are you serious when you say you can't easily multiply or divide by 1000?
You have missed the point. Force is a mass * distance / time. So, if I have a 1 g weight I want to move 1 meter in 1 second then it takes 1 Newton of force. Except it doesn't because Force is actually kilo-mass * distance / time. If I need to look up (or memorize) stuff like this then the entire advantage of metric goes away because I can just memorize the imperial way as well.
It just comes down to what you're familiar with. There's certainly a benefit to everybody using Metric in the same reasoning as there's a benefit to everybody using Mandarin.
I don't think the second point is particularly valid. The SI unit is a kg - which is weird, but always consistent. All Physics units in metric involve kilograms. I will grant that it's unusual that it has a prefix, but still - if you know the 7 base SI units (including the kg), the rest follows reasonably, and conversions are trivial compared to Imperial (orders of magnitude vs arbitrary multipliers).
Fundamentally yeah, what one's familiar with is the system that feels most intuitive, but I don't think these specific arguments against metric work super well
Hmmm... no?
With metric, once you know what a "meter" is, you have the distances. <milli>meter, <centi>meter, <deci>meter, ... It's one unit: the meter. And fractions of it that require trivial conversions.
With imperial, you have multiple units of distance: inches, feet, yards, football fields, miles.
The benefit of metric is that you have to memorise fewer units, period. Your example is a formula in physics. There you have to memorise F = m * a AND in which units those are (bonus if they are consistent between the formulas, of course). That's strictly equivalent between imperial and metric there.
> It just comes down to what you're familiar with.
Of course, if you're familiar with imperial and not metric, then you're better off with imperial!
> There's certainly a benefit to everybody using Metric in the same reasoning as there's a benefit to everybody using Mandarin.
That's an interesting example: Mandarin is known for being a lot harder than English. Obviously, if you grew up with Mandarin and no English, you will be more comfortable with Mandarin. But people speaking Mandarin don't insist on saying that Mandarin is not harder than English, in my experience :-).