A bag of bricks or a bag of feathers?

@wildgrass
You could weigh it in a vacuum. All nice and bagged up, a certain volume at a certain temperature, there is no upwards force in a vacuum so a scale at the bottom would do it quite nicely.

@wildgrass said
The confusion is a weight vs. density issue. Weight is a force.

The riddle is not wrong. A 10 kg bag of helium will weigh the same as a 10 kg bag of feathers too, but if tied to an obese man in a lawn chair the helium bag will rocket the lawn chair up to 11,000 feet.

I don't know how one would weigh helium though.

I get that, even before I started this thread. My point is that in regards to this riddle, two things aren't equally easily to lift up; for example, the average 50-pound child vs. a 50 pound dumbbell.

My wife has often complained she struggles to move my 40-pound dumbbell even though she can easily pick our kids who weight a bit more than that. To her, that dumbbell weights more than our kids. To my kids, who can lift each other up but not the dumbbell, that dumbbell weighs more.

Two weights can be objectively equal but one can still be more difficult to lift than the other.

I'm not disputing what anyone says here, to be clear, I'm just making a point that two objects weighing the same doesn't mean one can't be more difficult to lift, and therefore seem "heavier".

Really my issue is more with the riddle than with the science of whether 10 kilograms actually equals 10 kilograms. Of course it does, regardless of weight distribution.

It's not a big deal, I was just musing. As Wildgrass correctly said, there's nothing to debate.