So, agreed with this all being an excellent world modeling technology and it would be great if more humans felt comfortable using it. And I agree that most humans are not comfortable using arithmetic.
However, I don’t think units are part of arithmetic. I think they’re part of algebra. They’re like variables that you know never equal zero.
Now, if you know arithmetic, there’s really only a couple of things algebra tells you you’re allowed to do, and most people probably never internalize them: you can always add zero or multiply by one for any quantity, and you can multiply by or add a constant to both sides of an equation. That’s basically it. Using units is all about creative ways to multiply by one.
Also: A significant part of my professional life gets called “modeling” but is really just things like this, in the form of building spreadsheets of constants and assumptions to make rough estimates of quantities we can’t measure, then sanity checking them. It’s the kind of thing even many professional scientists and engineers and investors don’t feel comfortable doing outside their own specialties.
So, agreed with this all being an excellent world modeling technology and it would be great if more humans felt comfortable using it. And I agree that most humans are not comfortable using arithmetic.
However, I don’t think units are part of arithmetic. I think they’re part of algebra. They’re like variables that you know never equal zero.
Now, if you know arithmetic, there’s really only a couple of things algebra tells you you’re allowed to do, and most people probably never internalize them: you can always add zero or multiply by one for any quantity, and you can multiply by or add a constant to both sides of an equation. That’s basically it. Using units is all about creative ways to multiply by one.
Also: A significant part of my professional life gets called “modeling” but is really just things like this, in the form of building spreadsheets of constants and assumptions to make rough estimates of quantities we can’t measure, then sanity checking them. It’s the kind of thing even many professional scientists and engineers and investors don’t feel comfortable doing outside their own specialties.