Eric, You forget two major necessities for Standardization of Units of Measurement:
1. Prevention of Fraud in the Marketplace! 2. Reasonable expectation that manufactured parts are able to fit together as designed! Diversity (do as you please units of measurement) can not accomplish either of these two necessities! ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Eric Kow [[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, June 22, 2013 8:12 AM To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:52969] comms: cultural diversity/distinctiveness Hello US metrication fans! So one proposition I tend to enjoy is that the relationship between views and arguments should be understood in reverse. In other words, that we don't form our views from the arguments we hear, but choose the arguments we accept on the basis of their compatibility with our pre-existing views. With that in mind, I'd like to explore the Cultural Diversity/Distinctiveness Retort against standardisation. This retort has both a left wing (cultural differences should be celebrated) and a right wing flavour (cultural differences should be preserved, notably our distinct American way is good to preserve), but regardless of the flavour comes down to the feeling that standardisation threatens culture. You've probably heard the retort before: “so you think everybody should speak the same language, right?” OK so taking the lens of arguments-justify-views rather than arguments-shape-views, we may need to find a way to promote standardisation which aligns with people's pre-existing views. In other words, we need a concise/snappy response to the cultural diversity retort, or better yet, a way of talking about standardisation that anticipates and preempts the retort. So what sort of things do you think we can say? For the left wing crowd, it might make sense to talk about standards as bridges. Without the bridge, you can still communicate across cultures (row a boat across the river), but it's harder. Having bridges simplifies this sort of communication (you cross the bridge with less effort/conversion), and both cultures contribute to each other. On the other hand, bridge talk may be less helpful to a more insular crowd. What can you say there? How can you talk about standardisation in a way which is non-threatening to pro-America-first values? I realise I'm making a big rambly deal out of a small thing so let me back off a bit by saying we're not talking about exchanging philosophical essays here. These are things just boil down to short 1 or 2 sentence exchanges, or little facebook posts, or whatever. Concision matters. And winning the debate, leaving the other person speechless etc are very much not the goal. Getting people on board is. So what can we say? Eric PS. This comes from the recent pop vulgarisations on cognitive biases, and also my layman's mangling of Kahan et al's work: http://www.culturalcognition.net/browse-papers/cultural-cognition-of-scientific-consensus.html -- Eric Kow <http://erickow.com>
