Other than convincing people to change, what are the arguments against switching from our current Base 10 system to a Base 12 system?


Seems to have a lot of practical applications (time, elimination of 1/3, better factorization than base 10).


Advocates of a Base 10 system point to our ten fingers, but counting could be taught using the knuckles (3 knuckles per finger).

If you're going to go to all the trouble and expense of replacing the entire numerical base, it would make more sense to go to something compatible with binary, like 16.  It would certainly make hex arithmetic a lot easier.

well fuck, lets all speak Esperanto as well.

Give up and go to hexadecimal (base-16) 0-9, A,B,C,D,E
The computer world has been converting binary to hex for compactness for years. 4-bits per byte. You can do it by 'inspection.'

We spent a short time at octal (3-bits per digit) but dropped that.

Base 7 is where it is at... I guarantee that figuring out how many days until your next vacation will be much easier.

In all seriousness though, this is like proposing that imperil is better than metric. If supporters wish to state that decimals are base agnostic, OK, but that is hardly a convincing argument for change.  Yeah, fractions and factors, I get it.  But if you don't like bars in your math, then, frankly, you are just being irrational....

bah dum cha.   If you don't understand why 0.33vinculum is PRECISELY 1/3, then kindly repeat the third grade... maybe just not in a public school this time...

Honestly though, who cares if fourths and thirds are 'easier'...  the arguments I have seen are unconvincing if you really get down in the weeds.  20% becomes absolute insanity, and you might as well forget about figuring how many people are in the 1% if you switch to as duodecimal system.  Plus, think of the confusion and subsequent riots that will certainly happen in libraries nationwide when junior high kids start learning that the dewey decimal system in lit isn't the same thing as the duodecimal system in mathematics.  Complete. Chaos.  Almost certainly 800+ more murder/suicides a year will result.

They still teach Dewey right?  Or do we now have robots that go and pull books for you, to burn, spin a turbine, and run the computers nowadays?  Life was so much simpler when googling entailed paper cuts....

The majority of people can't even figure out base 10. There is no way to keep their head from exploding when someone shows them two extra numbers (an upside down 2 and 3 )

Video explaining the difference and advantage for the curious:

Sounds like a bunch of hippy nonsense to me.

It might herald the resurrection of the DEC PDP-8 12-bit computers (or the Harris VOS series 24 bit computers).

Base 10 is here to stay, something about 10 fingers.  

The interesting thing is 1-10 made sense to early math geeks, but the number zero escaped them for a long time.  Roman numerals don't even include 0.