Why Americans would move south if they used Celsius

Or why scales matter for measures

I have a theory and recently I got to put it to the test, I was in New York and Chicago, then the following week I was in Stockholm and they had one thing in common:

It was spectacularly cold

And this is where scale matters and where my one conspiracy theory comes to the fore:

I believe that America uses Fahrenheit because if they used Celsius they’d all move south

Scales frame the conversation

So the temperature in Stockholm, Chicago and New York were similar, but the language that people talked about the temperatures was markedly different, and a lot of that was linked to the way the different scales represent temperature.

In New York and Chicago there was acceptance that it was cold, however people would say things like “its not bad, its in the teens” or “its really getting cold, its nearly zero”. Meanwhile in Sweden it was very clear, the fact that it was due to get to -12C meant it was very cold, but it being -8C was already definitely cold.

Scales set behaviour

The result of this difference of scale and its impact on conversations was also evident on what ‘good’ looked like. In Sweden the tipping point was clearly ‘above zero’, while between New York and Chicago there was a discussion on whether 20s or 30s represented a tipping point where weather moved from freezing to merely cold.

In other words these two different scales framed the conversations differently, and in my conspiracy world also change how people behave. People in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland can’t move somewhere in their country to radically alter the temperature profile. People in America can, the fact that there is a lack of clarity on what “cold” and “freezing” truly are means that people’s expectations are different than in countries that use Celsius, there is a blurred view and that reduces the desire for change.

Basically I’m saying that if the US used Celsius there would be a mad rush south.

Same data different scales creates different perceptions

Another example of this is air pollution, while there are generally accepted baselines for measures, set out by the WHO, how countries choose to represent those measures changes. Some countries show the particulate number, some convert it to a scale, but really interestingly they all judge the trigger points differently.

So these are very similar measures, yet the words used to describe them, and the points that the words change are markedly different. India’s ‘Good’ can be higher than France’s ‘degraded’, the UK chooses ‘high’ over the more emotive ‘bad’ or ‘unhealthy’. This again sets behaviour and language, I’ve been told that pollution in New Delhi wasn’t too bad because it as only moderately polluted, which was the equivalent of very high, extremely bad and unhealthy in the UK, France and US respectively.

Scales matter to people and AI

The reason this matters is that by changing the scale or changing the wording against the scale you can alter people’s behaviours and the behaviour of AI. An AI that aims to manage pollution against India’s scale would work very differently to one that is managing against the French scale for instance.

This can work for you in that choosing your scale properly can help motivate people towards what you want them to do, but of course it can work against you if the scale has been imposed by someone else with a goal of biasing the results in a different direction.

Scales set the conversation, and the conversation sets behaviour

(research by Gemini on my conspiracy theory on temperature perception: https://gemini.google.com/share/3fa921a78dca)