My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
Blue his house
With a blue little window
And a blue Corvette
And everything is blue for him
And himself and everybody around
'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen (to listen)
If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.
Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)
But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!
"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)
For example, things can be small or big, a mouse is small, if you refine the vocabulary to include 10 size words, and the mouse is now minuscule, it is still small.
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
:/
ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.
"Alice is in Denver. Is Alice in (a) Canada or (b) Mexico?"
- Your boundary between Canada and Mexico is at 40° latitude, more southern than 53% of the population.Rather than asking "Is this blue or green?", it's "Does this look more blue to you, or more green to you?"
Because then your analogy becomes "Is Alice closer to Canada or Mexico?"
Denver is teal, the USA blue-green. Canada is Blue, and Mexico is green.
Their analogy is pretty on point.
Countries are not a continuum, they start and end at some specific line defined by constitutions, mutually agreed by neighbours (or disputed through war and diplomacy) Colours have no such incentive for strict unified definitions, so there is no point at which blue ends.
my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess
crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.
I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.
Seem to get ~172.
A better interface would have been to just show the final spectrum pic and slide to where you think the separation is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
I like to think this may have had something to do with them having both blue and green in their political usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_blue
I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.
Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.
If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.
Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
all my displays were so well defined out of the box, it wasnot worth it at all. Like you would need to use this particular profile for proper real industry printers to even have any benefit of it if even because all my displays were well calibrated.
I would argue that this would only make sense for highly profesional graphics designer and i don't think this experiment requires this level of granularity.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/
Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.
But with both eyes I got
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
I should test with one eye.
Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258 - Sept 2024 (527 comments)
Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.
I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.
I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.
Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?
very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.
Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.
isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?
The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.
It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.
It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.
I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.
There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.
EDIT: in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue
For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.