> This is like asking to simplify basic math for people who can’t be bothered to learn long division, thinking this will somehow allow them to do calculus.
Oh dang, you kinda sorta had me until here. This sways me towards @Perseid’s point. :P Math education is full of unnecessary mental friction, and it pushes lots of people away. We know that finding better, simpler ways to explain it does, statistically, allow more people to do calculus. Long division is a good example, because it’s one of the more common places kids separate & diverge between the ones who get it and the ones who don’t, and there are simpler alternatives to explaining long division than the curriculum you and I grew up with, alternatives that keep more people on the path of math literacy.
We can see similar outcomes all over, in civil and industrial design, and in software and games, from cars to road signs and building signs to user interface design - that making things easier to understand even by small amounts affects outcomes for large numbers of people, sometimes meaningfully affecting safety.
The numbering of centuries is admittedly a simple thing, but maybe it actually is unintentionally elitist, even if you don’t think condescendingly, to suggest people shouldn’t complain about a relatively small mental friction when having to convert between century and year? Yes most educated people can handle it without problems, but that doesn’t tell us enough about how many more people would enjoy it more or become educated if we smoothed out how we talk about it and make it slightly easier to talk about history. This particular example might not change many lives, but it adds up if we collectively improve the design of writing and education traditions, right? Especially if we start to consider the ~20% of neurodivergent people, and ~50% of less than average people.
> They do it because they never bothered
Why should people have to bother, if it’s not necessary? Your argument that some people are lazy might be deflecting. Is there a stronger argument to support the need to continue using this convention? Being able to read old history might be the strongest reason, but why should we waste energy and be okay excluding people, even if they are just lazy, by perpetuating a convention that has a better alternative?