Hey don't blame the English for that. I would be prepared to wager you couldn't find a single English engineer who uses lbfs or anything similar. Everyone in physics or engineering uses metric for everything to do with forces even those who might use mph for a speed informally.

> But in many fields they aren’t.

I am lost. What fields you are talking about?

1. I am unaware of any field operating within its own echo/context chamber using unit-less numeric notation for anything but actual unit-less quantities. Except for informal slap-dash arithmetic, on trivial calculations.

2. Units indicate the dimension being measured, not just the relative magnitude within that dimension. Nobody is going to know from any shared context, except in person, what a bare number measures.

3. Virtually every measurable quantity has multiple possible units of different relative magnitude, depending on micro context, so even people within a field, who agree on the dimension measured, still need units. Meters, light years, AU, angstroms?

4. You cannot apply standard formulas of physics, or anything else, without specific units. Formulas operate on dimensions, but to interpret and calculate any numbers, you need to know the specific unit being used for each dimension.

(In any context, but a late night napkin argument between two well acquainted colleagues in a bar, units are universally used. And in that case, the opportunity for serious misunderstandings is more likely to be from missing units, than the quantity of scotch each has imbibed, or how much they have spilled on the napkin.)

No, this are the sounds of underspecification.