IMO, the way the error bars combine is very intuitive. You are really just rounding to 6 or 12 sig-figs after every operation.
People just seem to get really hung up on the point that error bars exist in the first place, and combine.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the way that rounding is taught in school. It's absolutely hammered into use that you should never round until the very end, otherwise you lose precision.
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And that operations combine those error bars in unintuitive (until you develop that intuition… but then does that still count as intuition?) ways.
IMO, the way the error bars combine is very intuitive. You are really just rounding to 6 or 12 sig-figs after every operation.
People just seem to get really hung up on the point that error bars exist in the first place, and combine.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the way that rounding is taught in school. It's absolutely hammered into use that you should never round until the very end, otherwise you lose precision.