Something I found while reading about base systems, I can’t really wrap my head around it. Maybe it has to do with fractions?
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The choice of base in a counting system influences how we write that system. This means that “base 10” is kind of meaningless, because any counting system would describe itself as “base 10”.
For example, consider an alternate world that always had a base 11 counting system. That is, instead of “10” they had a special symbol for 9+1. Maybe it would be &. Then when they add 1 to &, they have reached the base of the counting system. That means they place a 1 in a new column to the left and start the first column over with a zero. Hence &+1=10. People in this world would just say that they have a “base 10” counting system and that people from our world are using “base &”. If we started talking about “base 11” they would think we were talking about what we think of as base 12, and so on.
The way out of this is an unspoken agreement to always use (the traditional) base 10 when describing the base of a counting system. This is fair and intuitive in a world where everyone is originally taught to count in base 10, but it would lead to a lot of confusion if we ever encountered folks who considered some other base to be natural.
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