https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDTxS9_CwZA

The "Final Jeopardy" question simply asked on what date did the 20th century begin, and all three contestants got it wrong, leading to a 3-way tie.

Imagine, for a moment, that AP adopted the OP's "don't count centuries" guidance. An enormous share of English-language publishing outfits would conform to the new rule in all future publications. Within a couple months, a large share of written media consumption would adopt this improved way of talking about historical time frames.

The best part? Absolutely no effort on the part of the general public. It's not like the OP is inventing new words or sentence structures. There's zero cognitive overhead for anyone, except for a handful of journalists and copywriters who are already used to that kind of thing. It's part of their job.

I think a lot of people take these sorts of ideas to mean "thou shalt consciously change the way you speak." In reality, we have the systems in place to make these changes gradually, without causing trouble for anyone.

If you don't like it, nobody's trying to police your ability to say it some other way - even if that way is objectively stupid, as is the case with counting centuries.

For scientific work I obviously prefer kelvin.

Celsius is nearly useless.

Ironic, given that one of the prime arguments in favor of metric is that it is easier.

Why do non-US people even care? And do y'all care that you are wrong? The US has recognized the SI. Citizens continue to use measurements they are comfortable with, and it does not hurt anyone. We are also not the only nation that has adopted SI but not made it mandatory. The UK is an obvious example.

Again, I'm back to 'why does anyone else even give a shit'? Aren't there more interesting things to ponder?

Celsius is for chemists.

Celsius works significantly better in cold climates for reasons mentioned in another comment.

In my old apartment, the difference between 73F and 74F was enough to make me quite cold or hot. And that’s a difference of about 0.5C. I’m not arguing that Farenheit is better, but I definitely do prefer it for setting my thermostat (which is a day to day thing) , but then again I grew up using it so that could be why I prefer it too.

Probably because they were made for US and changed the labels? I've never seen a thermostat with 0.5 C increments in Europe.

> the change between 25C and 26C is actually pretty big

I would maybe be able to tell you if it's 23 or 27, certainly I can't tell 1 C difference.

Farmers, drivers, people with gardens need to know if it will get subzero at night.

Nobody cares if it's 26.5 C or 26 C.

I do agree, though I live in Europe and C is the norm. I could never wrap my head around F.

That said, I think 0 is more important in daily life, below or above freezing. How much is that in F again?

There's also special warning for drivers if it was sub-zero because then the water on the roads freezes and it's very hard to break.

I'd say it's way more important a distinction than anything that F makes obvious.

That said I wished USA would move over to the unit everyone else is using, but only for the reason that everyone else is using it, that is the only thing that makes it superior, and it would take Americans at worst a couple of months to adjust.

That is an honest answer, which is refreshing. Beside that, there is not really any particular reason that the US has to make SI mandatory. We adopted SI nearly 50 years ago, we just did not make it mandatory. The US has a bit of national identity which leans towards rebelling, so making SI mandatory would probably be contentions anyway. And it's just not worth the argument, since it buys us very little of actual value.

I think the hardest unit to convert is probably length as there is not only a bunch of legacy systems and equipment out there, but Americans are very accustomed to fractional sub-units as opposed to the decimal cm, mm, etc. I’m not sure e.g. the building industry would ever stop saying e.g. four and five eighths. Personally I hate fractional lengths when using american tools. E.g. I’m used to a 11 mm wrench being smaller than a 13 mm wrench. I need to stop and think before I know which is smaller a five eights or a three quarters.

That's an interesting way to phrase it. I, and everyone I know, have both metric and SAE tools. At least for wrenches & sockets.

> I need to stop and think before I know which is smaller a five eights or a three quarters.

I'm with you there. I've gotten in the habit of just mentally converting every SAE size to 32nds. I wouldn't really mind losing SAE, but that is not happening. What really makes my blood pressure goes up is Ford ... they mix metric and SAE fasteners on their cars. WTF! Pick one! Subaru is at the other end, easy to work on because 10 & 12mm wrenches will work for maybe 9 out of 10 bolts or nuts.

I agree it is really nice to use base-12 until it brakes, but it brakes much worse then metric. If you have to divide into 32nds everything about feet and inches is much worse (in metrics we would just use millimeters). The worst offender are wrenches which don’t order intuitively. In metric, if you 13 mm wrench is too big, you just grab an 11 mm wrench. In inches if your 13/16th inch wrench is too big, do you grab the 5/8th? or three-quarters next?

If you, as a US citizen, settle abroad, be prepared to run into a wall with Fahrenheits. People in the rest of the world don't have the intuitive grasp whether 50 degrees Fahrenheit is warm or cold.

Yeah that's the right terminology. I knew it when I said citizens it wasn't quite right but I blanked on the right answer. 'Residents' is pretty obvious.

> be prepared to run into a wall with Fahrenheits

I agree it's worth knowing just enough about celsius to use it casually when you are traveling. e.g. I just remember 20 is room temperature and every 5C is about 10F. Close enough. And remembering '6' is enough to remember how km and miles are related.

Anyone who is settling abroad ought to be able to pick up intuitive celsius in a couple days. When everyone around you uses the same measuring unit, you adapt pretty quickly IME.

+10°C is "it's somewhat cold, put a jacket on". +20°C is comfortable in light clothing. +30°C is pretty hot. +40°C is really hot, put as little clothing as society permits and stay out of direct sun.

Same with negatives, but in reverse.

Boiling water is +100°C, melting ice is very close to 0°C. I used that multiple times to adjust digital thermometers without having to look up anything.

It's the most comfortable system I can imagine. I tried living with Fahrenheit for a month just for fun, and it was absolutely not intuitive.

40 F is a good time for getting winter tires on.

As someone who lives in a humid, wet area that goes from -40 at night in winter to 100+ F in summer, I also vastly prefer Fahrenheit.

The difference between 60, 70, 80 and 90 is pretty profound with humidity, and the same is true in winter. I don't think I've ever set a thermometer to freezing or boiling, ever. All of my kitchen appliances have numbers representing their power draw.

I too live in a region with 80 (Celsius) degree yearly variation (sometimes more; the maximum yearly difference I've lived through is about 90 degrees IIRC: -45 in January to +43 in July), and Fahrenheit makes absolutely no sense to me in this climate.

If you want to convince yourself, go out on the road in non-winter tires when it is sub-40F, find an open space where you can experiment, and then do a panic stop. Like you might have to do if someone jumps out in front of you.

That is what convinced me to not wait until it was freezing before I put on cold weather tires.

While that is true, does it not illustrate exactly the problem? Nobody ever says someone is in their 17th year when they are 16. That would be very confusing.

True and should not be forgotten in this debate.

But clear communication is a need many people have.

Same thing for "this weekend" when. Not spoken during a weekend.

(This Xth century business always bothered and genuinely confused me to no end and everyone always dismissed my objections that it's a confusing thing to say. I'm a bit surprised, but also relieved, to see this thread exists. Yes, please, kill all off-by-one century business in favor of 1700s and 17th settecento or anything else you fancy, so long as it's 17-prefixed/-suffixed and not some off-by-anything-other-than-zero number)

Hope this clarifies. Not to miss the forest for the trees, to reiterate, the main takeaway is that it may be better to define and use a specific tag to pinpoint a sequence of events in a given period (e.g. settecento) instead of gesturing with something as arbitrary and wide as a century (18th century art).

All these systems used the Julian system for months and days, but differed in terms of the year and (partialy) in the first day of the year.

It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers and be like ISO. Choose year zero.

Moreover, I definitely find the ordinality of pedantry more interesting than the pedantry of ordinality.

Or, just to add more fuel to the fire, we could use the Holocene/Human year numbering system to have a year zero and avoid any ambiguity between Gregorian and ISO dates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

It means just what it says. In the common calendar, the year after 1 BC (or BCE in the new notation) was 1 AD (or CE in the new notation). There was no "January 1, 0000".

No, it isn't, since you explicitly said to start the first century on the date that doesn't exist. What does that even mean?

10 C = 50 F = 283.15 K

1 = 0.999…

Things can have more than one name. The existence of the year 0 CE is not in question. What’s in question is whether that’s a good name for it or not.

The point is that some days got skipped over the centuries, but there's no need to make the Centuries have weird boundaries.

That's not what the poster I originally responded to is saying. He's saying the 1st Century should start on a nonexistent day.

That allows for consistent zero-indexed centuries. It doesn't have any other practical consequences that matter.

Speaking for my self, this doesn’t become any more intuitive the more you use this, people constantly confuse decades and get insulted by age ranges (and freaked out when suddenly the clock is “going five”). People are actually starting to refer to the 90s as nían (the nine) and the 20-aughts as tían (the ten). Thought I don’t think it will stick. When I want to be unambiguous and non-confusing I usually add the -og-eitthvað (and something) as a suffix to a year ending with zero, so the 20th century becomes nítjánhundruð-og-eitthvað, the 1990s, nítíu-og-eitthvað and a person in their 20s (including 20) becomes tuttugu-og-eitthvað.

We have special rules for leap years, that would just be a single leap-back century.

At the scale of centuries, starting 2nd century at 100 as opposed to 101 is just an 1% error, so we can live with it. For the kind of uses we use centuries for (not to do math, but to talk roughly about historical eras) it's inconsequential anyway.

1700s means 1700–1709

1700ss means 1700–1799

To go one step further:

2000s means 2000-2009

2000ss means 2000-2099

2000sss means 2000-2999

(0, because only after the first question, we have actually 1 episode performed. Consequently, the 1-episode is then the second one.)

Some of the characters in Death Stranding, namely the main one, have a given-name, profession, employer convention -- as in Sam Porter Bridges.

Glenn Miller, Gregory Porter and Sam Smith just happen to have been more inclined to make music.

In Polish: [lata] tysiącsiedemsetne (6 [+2] syllables) vs osiemnasty wiek (5 syllables).

We do the same with people's ages. For the entire initial year of your life you were zero years old. Likewise, from years 0-99, zero centuries had passed so we should call it the zeroth century!

At least this is how I justify to my students that zero-indexing makes sense. Everyone's fought the x-century vs x-hundreds before so they welcome relief.

Izzard had the right idea: https://youtu.be/uVMGPMu596Y?si=1aKZ2xRavJgOmgE8&t=643

No, we don't.

When we refer to 'the first year of life', we mean the time from birth until you turn 1.

Similarly, you'd say something like 'you're a child in the first decade of your life and slowly start to mature into a young adult by the end of the second decade', referring to 0-9 and 10-19, respectively.

But practically speaking we usually do. I always hear people refer to events in their life happening “when I was 26” and never “in the 27th year of my life”. Sure you could say the latter, but practically speaking people don’t (at least in English).

There may be something cultural that caused such a shift, like a change in how math or reading is taught (or even that it’s nearly universally taught, which changes how we think and speak because now a sizeable chunk of the population thinks in visually written words rather than sounds).

(I had some confused conversation with a bus driver once. Bizarre experience to have so much language barrier between two EFL speakers, in English!)

So whenever I talk time with the locals here I repeat the time back in numerical style to avoid confusion.

"The shop opens tomorrow at half ten".

"Thanks, store opens at nine thirty. See you then."

"No..."

But I think this also illustrates just how averse our culture is to using zero-indexing in counts: The age number absolutely is zero-indexed - a baby before before the first birthday is zero years old. But no one calls it like that, instead we drop the year count entirely and fall back to the next-largest nonzero unit, i.e. we say the baby is so-and-so-many months old. And for newborns not yet a month old, we count in weeks, etc.

I think, culturally, it's not that surprising as this method of counting is older than the entire concept of "zero". But I think it shows that there is little hope of convincing a large number of non-nerd people to start counting things with zeros.

1. On your 26th Birthday, when you say you turned 26 what it means is that you have now lived 26 years. People generally understand this, even if they are going to be spending the next year saying they are 26.

2. It is not uncommon for people to demarcate their age on their birthday in revolutions around the Sun, as a kind of meme. “I’ve now traveled around the Sun twenty-six times.” or something like that, when reflecting on their lives on their Birthday.

The colloquial usage is our legally-defined age. A shortcut for our laws to take, the age-gating ones anyway. It hasn’t replaced our cultural understanding of what the first year of our life actually was.

Sure, but no one ever uses that phrasing after you turn one. Then it's just "when they were one", "when they were five", whatever.

So sure, maybe we can continue to say "the 1st century", but for dates 100 and later, no more.

Heck, few people say anything about 'the first year of life' even when talking about someone that young. It is too imprecise, because things change so rapidly. In my experience the most common convention is to use months to describe age before someone turns 2.

Can't say I've ever had to refer to someone's first year or first decade of their life, but sure I'd do that if it came up. Meanwhile, 0-indexed age comes up all the time.

If you are going to be that pedantic, I would point out that one only has one birthday.

(Well, unless one's mother is extremely unlucky.)

First = 0 Second = 1 Toward = 2 Third = 3 …

This way, the semantic meaning of the words “first” (prior to all others) and “second” (prior to all but one) are preserved, but we get sensical indexing as well.

In "figure of speech", or conventual use, people start drinking in their 21st year, not their 22nd. In common parlance, they can vote in their 18th year, not their 19th.

We talk of a child in their 10th year as being age 10. Might even be younger. Try asking a people if advice about a child in their "5th year of development" means you're dealing with a 5 year old. Most will say yes.

So perhaps it's logical to count from zero when there's no digit in the magnitude place, because you haven't achieved a full unit till you reach the need for the unit. Arguably a baby at 9 months isn't in their first year as they've experienced zero years yet!

Similarly "centuries" don't have a century digit until the 100s, which would make that the 1st century and just call time spans less than that "in the first hundred years" (same syllables anyway).

It's unsatisfying, but solves the off by one errors, one of the two hardest problems in computer science along with caching and naming things.

That’s not the case, though. They can vote (and drink, in quite a few countries) when they are at least 18 years old, not when they are in their 18th year (who would even say that?)

People are 18 years old (meaning that 18 years passed since their date of birth) on their 18th birthday. There is no need of shoehorning 0-based indexing or anything like that.

> Most will say yes.

Most people say something stupid if you ask tricky questions, I am not sure this is a very strong argument. Have you seriously heard anybody talking about a child’s “5th year of development”, except maybe a paediatrician? We do talk about things like “3rd year of school” or “2nd year of college”, but with the expected (1-indexed) meaning.

> So perhaps it's logical to count from zero when there's no digit in the magnitude place, because you haven't achieved a full unit till you reach the need for the unit. Arguably a baby at 9 months isn't in their first year as they've experienced zero years yet!

It’s really not. To have experienced a full year, you need a year to have passed, which therefore has to be the first. I think that’s a cardinal versus ordinal confusion. The first year after an event is between the event itself and its first anniversary. I am not aware of any context in which this is not true, but obviously if you have examples I am happy to learn.

> It's unsatisfying, but solves the off by one errors, one of the two hardest problems in computer science along with caching and naming things.

Right. I know it is difficult to admit for some of us, but we are not computers and we do not work like computers (besides the fact that computers work just fine with 1-indexing). Some people would like it very much if we counted from 0, but that is not the case. It is more productive to understand how it works and why (and again cardinals and ordinals) than wishing it were different.

Writers.

And yes, cardinal versus ordinal is my point. The farther from the origin, the less people are likely to want them different.

You are correct that nobody says "22nd year" in this context, but nobody says "21st year" either. The former is awkward but the latter is just incorrect.

On the contrary, enough people say it, it's a quora question:

https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-mean-to-be-in-your-twenty...

Authors love phrases like this. Which, in turn, comes from another ordinal/cardinal confusion stemming back to common law:

"A person who has completed the eighteenth year of age has reached majority; below this age, a person is a minor."

That means they completed being 17, but that's just too confusing, so people think you stop being a minor in your 18th year.

Consider a newborn. As soon as they're squeezed out they are in their first year of life. That continues until the first anniversary of their decanting, at which point they are one year old and enter their second year of life.

There is nobody, nobody, who refers to a baby as being in their zeroth year of life. Nor would they refer to a one-year-old as still being in their first year of life as if they failed a grade and are being held back.

The pattern continues for other countable things. Breakfast is not widely considered the zeroth meal of the day. Neil Armstrong has never been considered the zeroth man on the moon nor is Buzz Aldrin the first. The gold medal in the Olympics is not awarded for coming in zeroth place.

No one's saying it's true! All that's being claimed is that writers will often use phrases like "became an adult in their 18th year" or "was legally allowed to drink in their 21st year".

It's completely incorrect, but some people use it that way, and ultimately everyone understands what they actually mean.

People commonly make the mistake of thinking otherwise, but that's all it is. A mistake.

Nevertheless the traditional "how old are you" system uses a number 1 less.

In Indian English terms, we do 'complete' age - aiui more common in India is to one-index, i.e. you're the age of the year you're in, and to disambiguate you might hear someone say they're '35 complete', meaning they have had 35 anniversaries of their birth (36 incomplete).

Zero-based: P % N

One-based: ((P - 1) % N) + 1

It might seem trivial, but each +/-1 is an opportunity for confusion and a bug nest. With zero-based arrays, it's often the case that the only required +/-1's are when producing and consuming human-readable one-based text.

The next stop on the zero-based epiphany train is the realization that a convenient way to store a range is a { first, first_past } tuple. The size of the range is (first_past - first). The whole-array range is { 0, size }, while a simple empty range is { 0, 0 } (zero is often the default initialization, simplifying things further.)

Both elements are indices, so they can be similarly manipulated, compared and range-checked, making many 'if' clauses easier to think about and verify. If there is a bug, it often ends up being harmless because of the arithmetic properties of this scheme.

Once you start dealing with multiple ranges, the advantages are even more obvious. Two ranges are adjacent iff (first_a == past_b || first_b == past_a). The intersection of two ranges is { max(first_a, first_b), min(past_a, past_b) }, which is nonempty iff they overlap. An array of M adjacent ranges is stored as a uniform (M+1)-tuple.

This realization has become so second-nature for me that I'm probably overlooking four or five even better examples here.

It's a C family (predecessors and descendants) idiosyncrasy that very unfortunately got out of hand. Most other old languages had either 1-based indexing or were agnostic. Most notably FORTRAN, which is the language for numerical calculations is 1-based.

The seminal book Numerical Recipies was first published as 1- based for FORTRAN and Pascal and they only latter added a 0-based version for C.

Personally, coming from Pascal, I think the agnostic way is best. It is not only about 0-based or 1-based but that the type system encodes and verifies the valid range of index values, e.g. in Pascal you define an array like this:

    temperature = array [ -35 .. 60 ] of real;

   temperature[61];

I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this feature is pretty much absent from any practically used language except ADA.

Outside of that machine context, where an array is a contiguous block of RAM that can be indexed with memory pointers, there's no particular reason to do offset indexing. 1-based works just fine - "first element, second element" - works just fine and is perfectly intuitive.

Different types of indexing can make sense in different situations. Some languages even allow that. In Ada, for example, arrays can start at whatever index you define.

It really doesn't. You can make it work obviously but you end up with much less elegant code, with +1 and -1 all over the place. E.g. for accessing a row of a matrix you get [width(i-1)+1, widthi+1) instead of the far saner [widthi, (width+1)i)

Generic code also becomes much more awkward.

Neither is a true one-size-fits-all solution. They're different kinds of indexes that serve different purposes. The choice of zero-based everywhere is an engineering tradeoff, nothing more.

Perhaps, but this is extremely rare compared to tasks that are far more elegant with 0-based indexing. Also the worst you can get there is a single +1 in the display code, while trying to shoe-horn algorithms into 1-based code can get much more awkward.

I don't know if I feel that strongly about it but I tend to agree. I see more value in adopting a 24 hour clock than making SI mandatory. AM/PM is silly.

But I do wished people would stop writing schedules in the 12 hour system. You get weird stuff like bold means PM etc. to compensate for the space inefficiency of 12 hour system

What's this reference to? Afaik, Lua uses `os.time` and `os.date` to manage time queries, which is then reliant on the OS and not Lua itself

A calendar change like this is a non-starter. A lot of disruption for no real purpose other than pleasing some pedantics.

In fact archeologists have adapted to writing "CE" and "BCE" these days, but despite that flexibility I've never seen somebody write a date range like "the 1200s BCE". But they should.

For earlier dates "n years ago" is usually easier, e.g. "The first humans migrated to Australia approximately 50,000 years ago".

I often get excited by some discovery sounding a lot older than it actually is, for reasons like this.

> There’s no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry.

This isn't really an argument against the new convention, since even in the old convention there was no convenient way of doing so.

People mostly just say "the early 2000s" or explicitly reference a range of years. Very occasionally you'll hear "the aughts".

Think of how individual years are named. Back in for example 2004, "two thousand and four" was probably the most prevalent style. But "two thousand and .." is kind of a mouthful, even if you omit the 'and' part.

Over time, people will find a shorter way. When 2050 arrives, how many people are going to call it "two thousand and fifty"? I'd almost bet money you'll hear it said "twenty fifty". Things already seem to be headed this way.

The "twenty ___" style leads to the first ten years being 20-oh-this and 20-oh-that, so there you have it, the 20-ohs.

(Yes, pretty much the same thing as 20-aughts, gotta admit)

I will resent it till I die.

The 20xx vs 200x does indeed leave some room for ambiguity in writing, verbally most people say 20-hundred-era vs 20-null-null-era.

There is the apostrophe convention for decades. You can refer to the decade of 1800–1809 as "the '00s" when the century is clear from the context. (The Chicago Manual of Style allows it: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/299512.) If you wanted to upset people, you could try adding the century back: "the 18'00s". :-)

There is also the convention of replacing parts of a date with "X" characters or an em dash ("—") or an ellipses ("...") in fiction, like "in the year 180X". It is less neat but unambiguous about the range when it's one "X" for a digit. (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YearX has an interesting collection of examples. A few give you the century, decade, and year and omit the millennium.)

Edit: It turns out the Library of Congress has adopted a date format based on ISO 8601 with "X" characters for unspecified digits: https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/.

* Sorry, I don't know how to write that in past, like haber sido in Spanish, my main language.

That's because the purported year of the birth of Christ was the "first year of the lord", or AD 1, and that's when the first century started. In turn that's because at the time Latin had a word for nothing but not a word for zero, so you couldn't count years starting at zero.

That also means that those old enough to have partied on December 31, 1999 were technically partying for the beginning of the last year of the second millennium.

I am also not American and not a native English speaker. In fact Latin languages say in expanded form "après Jésus-Christ", "dopo Cristo", "despues de Cristo" (abbreviation is only used in writing), so even speakers who are not religious very much know the reference even if they couldn't care less. We're stuck with it.

I agree that it's more of a "who wants to be a millionaire" quirk than something that actually matters, but this case of correcting someone was one of the few cases where it matters.

I am Christian in a very literal sense, would use AD dating etc. and have no problem with it whatsoever, I just don't feel the need to suffix (or sometimes prefix) it with 'year of our lord' the way some Americans do; I find it quite jarring.

It's like feeling the need to say 'day of rest' or 'sabbath' every time you say a particular day of the week, or some other (possibly areligious) descriptor of something whenever it's mentioned.

I'm running into a similar issue recently. Turns out that many people saying they are '7 months pregnant' actually mean they are in the 7th month, which starts after 26 weeks (6 months!)

I’ve no idea. When did the American revolution happen?

Not everyone’s cultural frame of reference is the same as yours. I can tell you when the Synod of Whitby happened, though.

Even more tiresome when they feel the need to comment about it.

Most people here, even non-Americans, likely have at least a rough idea of when the American Revolution was. And those who don't will either just gloss over it and think no more of it, or find the answer on the internet in a shorter amount of time than it took me to type this sentence. And then there are people like you. Look at the completely useless subthread you've spawned! Look at the time I've bothered to waste typing this out! Sigh.

I also didn't know what the date of the American revolution was, but I understood it was just an example.

> if you’re like me, you’ll find the question much easier to answer given the second version of the sentence, because you remember the American revolution as starting in 1776, not in the 76th year of the 18th century.

The article is "Here's a thing I don't understand! Let's say how silly it is by comparing it to a thing I do understand."

I mean, thanks for that. I could write an article about "Why do people insist on quoting the American revolution as a reference date when they could just say 'late 18th century'". Which would make the same point and get us precisely as far along as this article did.

> Look at the time I've bothered to waste typing this out!

I feel the same way, dude. I feel exactly the same.

The events that directly affect the modern world should be covered in school. I’d say revolutions that created large modern states would be among them.

The reason most US Americans probably can place the American Revolution is because I assume it's so often commememorated there. In Germany, people would be much more likely to remember the years 1933, 1949 and 1989, because of how often they're referenced.

The Russian revolution as well. And the Chinese one. It’s quite difficult to make sense of the late 20th century (yes, I know) without them. Or the early 21th.

What I mostly remember about the HRE is that it wasn’t Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. :D. My first guess of mid 1600s is not too far off.

(Westphalian sovereignty is interesting… reading about it now.)

Those governments have been replaced multiple times over the centuries however, so achievements at the time were not stable.

I would be extremely surprised if Sweden was unique among European nations in this regard.

The remaining majority of the world (the west is a minority) sincerely couldn't care less about the American or French or Industrial Revolutions or Columbus (re)discovering America or the Hundred Years War or the Black Death or the Fall of Rome or whatever else.

Kind of like how we as westerners generally couldn't care less about Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Indian, or Polynesian histories.

The culture we grow up in and become indoctrinated by determines what is important and what is not.

And just so we're clear, this bit of ignorance is perfectly fine: Life is short, ain't nobody got time for shit that happened to people you don't even know who lived somewhere you will never see.

Arguing you shouldn’t need to learn it isn’t impressive in any shape or form. It’s middle-brow level (non)curiosity, and less than welcome here.

We only have so many hours in a day and so many days in a lifetime, while knowledge is practically infinite.

I limited my initial statement to educated folks, and presumably those who would like to be one.

/history/democracy/milestones -> relatively important.

Just like it would be unusual for an educated person not to know when the Battle of Hastings was... unless they aren't British.

And that's about as close a country to America as you can get. Do you think the educated in Singapore or Kenya learn about the American Revolution? Hell even in the UK we did not spent a single history lesson on it. I'm not exaggerating.

In my opinion, a battle is generally not important compared to a milestone of democracy. I learned about the Magna Carta in 1215 and saw a copy once and appreciate that knowledge.

But sure, keep arguing for ignorance and dismissing education if you’d like—we’ll enjoy the show here in posterity.

Maybe not, but that's hardly the only thing from history that we didn't learn about. I think you're massively underestimating how much history there is. Most of the world has millennia of history. It's not like America where you can cover the entire history of the country.

Also history is an optional lesson past age ~14. You can choose to do Geography instead. But I'm not going to call you uneducated for not knowing what a medial moraine is.

Hell, I would even go as far as to say the American Revolution is irrelevant even for most Americans because it has nothing of practical value. We (Americans) all know about it to varying degrees, but again that is due to growing up and being indoctrinated in it.

A pretty important reason for learning about the history of democracy is to learn how and why to preserve it.

All the while masquerading as intelligent conversation. It’s only interesting until you follow it to its conclusion. Anti-intellectualism in a nutshell, and you should be embarrassed to be seen in the vicinity. :D

Most people are far too busy living lives to have time to spare spelunking into tomes; they usually don't even understand what democracy actually is either, but they get by fine in life just the same.

The reality is no man can learn all there is to know, it's physically impossible and lines in the sand must be drawn. Given that, which side of the line a certain historical factoid lies will vary; some will consider the American Revolution important and some will not, and some will be indoctrinated by their society, all are fine.

Also, I'm going to cite the HN Guidelines here for your reference going forwards:

>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.