the way people treat units in science is really disorienting and weird to us and I don't understand why it's so common for people to just... ignore units
I don't even know how to explain what it is that they're doing that bugs us but it's really wrong and hinders our understanding of things a lot
@Felthry ignoring units makes me uncomfortable, too
like ... if we're using numbers to talk about reality, then the units have to be there for the numbers to mean /anything/
6 is not a distance. 6 feet is a distance, or 6 inches, or 6 meters, or 6 furlongs, but the number 6 is ... a number, in a vacuum, meaning nothing concrete
...
...I think a lot of people think of math as a thing that only happens to numbers and doesn't happen to things that are real? as if you can't just ... use math on the real world, as if that is outside the reach of what math could possibly be talking about
which is b-i-z-a-r-r-e
@packbat but also people tend to like... they treat the units like something to strip off before you start Doing Math and then tack back on when you're done, which I don't get at all
@Felthry like, that's why I'm wondering if they have this math stuff separated off in this realm of...
...idk, stop thinking of the world as a real place that can be described by patterns and just Do The Operations
like math isn't /real/, it's just the thing you do to get an answer that you then bring back to reality
because if math is just operations on numbers and the numbers are the same no matter whether you keep the units or not, then why keep the units?
it's disconcerting to me that people's conception of mathematics might be that ... isolated from everything else
longish
@packbat oh something I just remembered is that in the field of electromagnetics, when reading stuff from before SI standardization, things are usually in cgs units which you would think are just SI units with a scaling factor, and for the most part they are, but there are two particularly annoying "units" you'll encounter: esu and emu. esu, or electrostatic unit, basically means "we're doing electrostatic calculations and I can't be bothered to figure out the proper units to put on this thing", and emu or electromagnetic unit just means "we're doing electromagnetic calculations and I can't be bothered to figure out the proper units to put on this thing"
made worse is the fact that you end up with like actual tables of values in things like esu/m or something
re: longish
@Felthry ...not the most imaginative names for new units.
re: longish
@packbat they aren't even consistent in what they mean is the main point I wanted to get across
re: longish
@Felthry oh ew >_<
agreement; poisoning/suffocation metaphor
@Felthry it /is/ really wrong
it's, like, horrifying, imho? it is like carbon monoxide bonding to hemoglobin in place of oxygen, filling in the space that mathematics could have fit into someone's mind with some other thing that gives them no understanding
but it fits with what I observe