Is my blue your blue? (2024)(ismy.blue) |
Is my blue your blue? (2024)(ismy.blue) |
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.
The data remains available. It was a TidyTuesday ("social data project") for 2025-07-08.[4] This response[5] looked at TFA. (This week's TT is ag tariffs.[9])
I just did a quick and sloppy search, so there's likely more out there. Curiously, I found AIMode and Bing/chat less immediately helpful than I'd have guessed.
Years ago I used the xkcd data for a prototype web interactive for kids, which shader filtered video to selected colors... but it was overlapping rather than a partition, and I'd never leave out cyan. Hmm, maybe a vibe coding target.
[1] https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ [2] https://www.datapointed.net/2010/06/xkcd-color-name-strata/ [3] https://luminoso.com/the-color-cloud-an-interactive-visualiz... [4] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat... [5] https://jofrhwld.github.io/blog/posts/2025/07/2025-07-09_col... Off topic: [9] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat...
"Is it blue" ?
No clown, learn colors
I want to say that shifted my score a lot. But every time I play I get a pretty different score, even on the same screen calibration. So, uh...
Like forest green olive green. navy blue.
Also maybe the full color spectrum. And a select set of colors to pick from.
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.
Still an interesting experiment, but I would be cautious about drawing conclusions about anything from it.
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.
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.
No, turquoise is turquoise!!1
* HDR vs SDR mode
* Different monitors have different color replication ranges
* Monitor and OS color and brightness controls (brightness affects color perception)
* Interior lighting
* Monitor technology (LCD, OLED, etc)
Meaning even if a color was meant to be X, it just won't appear that way given the combinations above.
I noticed that what I was actually seeing later on was 'is this more blue or green than the last colour' due to my eyes adjusting to the previous screen and just seeing the difference.
very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.
Yeah, so to me, tortoise is definitely blue.
Edit: typo tortoise -> turquoise
I have UV filters on my glasses and things really changed when I took them on of off. I was much greener with the UV filtering glasses on. I guess my eyes are not picking up on things somehow.
Problem is that it asks to categorize colors that to me are neither blue nor green
This has nothing at all to do with colour perception, or, if actual differences in perception are involved, this test fails to distinguish those from individual differences in assignment to linguistic categories.
EDIT: To actually test something like this, you need to make an assumption that cannot easily be tested or supported by evidence.
E.g. say we could all agree that, generally, blue + orange is a more pleasant pairing than blue + green. One might then imagine a series of images using orange + varying interpolations between blue and green, with the prompt being "is this combination of colours more or less aesthetically pleasing than the last". The average cutpoint could then be interpreted as a subjective judgement of where e.g. teals become "more blue", from an aesthetic / complementary standpoint. But this test does nothing of the sort.
Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.
Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.
Pretty sure I accidentally picked blue for a green once.
isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?
No, turquoise is turquoise. You gave me two options, and you act like I didn't know that word exists
It needs to interpolate between blue and green in the CIELAB color space.
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.
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.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
In Dutch it's called "appelblauwzeegroen" (apple-blue sea-green, yes it's weird) so it's not surprising either that my wife sees it as green I guess.
First I shifted the app to use P3 `oklch(.7066 .1611 $hue)` with range (150..210) centered on cyan at 180°, same as sRGB. No change, so it's not some sort of artifact of colorspaces. Then I upped it to 16 steps instead of 8. The window narrowed slightly, but the same first-then-the-rest shift kept happening. Finally I raised the random color static mask duration from 200ms to 5000ms. Scored 180 +/- 1. Huh. Makes sense, given the image persistence stuff I deal with.
So, for those seeing that same variability I'd recommend editing that first (local response override index-blah.js, search `, 200` replace `, 5000` by hand, reload page) to get a more stable result.
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
When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.
If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.
My question is: - I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there? - If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62531754/how-to-draw-a-h...
I have a colorblindness simulator on my computer called Sim Daltonism and when I use that on the color wheel, it does indeed appear to have white, desaturated lines radiating from the center at those three angles. In the simulator, the one at 11:00 is the strongest, followed by 3:00, and the 7:00 one is faintest. My hunch is that the perceptually uniform color space samples you're looking at have more uniform brightness, so those boundaries blend in to the surrounding colors better. They look nicer to me too -- they still represent saturated, composite colors like teal, but just at a pleasant, harmonious brightness. It's very interesting to compare perception!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
I think the bands you’re referring to are an artifact.
No idea why
Well... uhm, you may want to verify that claim.
My job was to find odd things on a one third section of a side of beef as it went past and cut it off. 1500 or so per day.
The test showed numbers created with blobs of close colours.
The last test didn't have a number in it.
Cheeky buggers.
However, I know enough about perception to know that this called for some hacking.
So as soon as I saw the second color I realized I needed to look at something else. So each time after choosing and seeing the next color I looked around quite a bit, inside and through the windows at the outside (I happen to be in a Hawaii, so blues and greens are abundant) before choosing and I noticed significantly different color perception after looking around, specifically, I had more confidence in whether it was blue or green.
I can imagine if you just stare at the colors and try to power through, you might get kinda irritated.
Do they see everything beyond the initial green as a shade of blue?
--Edit--
My red/green colorblind father just got back me with this result:
> Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258 - Sept 2024 (527 comments)
Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
For you, turquoise is green."
Took it 3 times (90%, 85%, 87%). At least, I now know why sometimes I'm surprised that people call green things blue :)
To be honest, there should have been a "neither" category, because that was frustrating to classify a color that is clearly neither. But I understand the need for a binary choice for this experiment.
Turquoise `#40E0D0 ` feels green to me, while Dark Turquoise `#00CED1` , I can agree to consider as blue.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.
I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.
As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.
The biggest problem here is that people have wildly uncalibrated monitors that often have color cast tints. I color calibrate my monitors and even my factory calibrated MacBook has a slight green tint.
People should also do hue differentiation tests like this one to see if they have any color deficiency: https://www.xrite.com/hue-test
That’s way more interesting.
Even if anyone actually calibrated their screens, many cheap monitor panels are so shitty the calibration can’t help. I bought two 4K LG monitors at the same time and based on serial numbers, they’re likely from the same batch but LG likes to mix panels on their cheaper products. They have wildly different color spaces to the point where one swallows several points of grayscale*, which means I have to use the right monitor when viewing sites otherwise I lose the subtle gray-on-white that designers love so much.
* black crush I think its called
“ Best Score for your Gender -2147483648 Worst Score for your Gender 2147483647”
Other languages draw those boundaries in different places. For example, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are separate basic color terms (goluboy vs. siniy), so asking a Russian speaker to collapse those into a single category would feel just as wrong as collapsing orange into red or yellow does to us.
Cyan isn't a basic color term in English. So yes, the test is basically asking: if you had to assign this color to one of the basic English categories, what would it be?
The frustration you're describing is kind of the point. With something like orange, English gives us a clear category, so "rounding" feels wrong. With cyan, it doesn't, so people end up splitting it differently.
I don't know. I am a russian speaker and for me light blue (goluboy) is simply a type of blue.
Moreover, in ancient languages there were very few words that designed just a color, with no other meaning for the word, but it was very frequent to use words derived from the names of various things, which meant "of the color of the X thing".
For instance it was frequent to say that some things were "of the color of fire". Most likely this was intended to say that they were orange. For red objects one would have said "of the color of blood", while for yellow objects one would have said "of the color of sulfur" or "of the color of gold". "Of the color of saffron" is also likely to have meant "orange", though saffron may have many hues, from reddish to yellowish, depending on how it is prepared.
Isn't this how things are still today? For example "orange".
Is my "520 nm green" actually your "635 nm red"? And vice versa?
Are all of our color embeddings different despite the same g-protein coupled biochemical activation?
In Ancient Greek, "cyan" was blue, not blue-green. More precisely, it was the color of the pigment "ultramarine blue", which has remained widely used until today. The name of this pigment was already used by the Hittites, long before the Greeks.
An example of a Latin author who distinguished consistently green, blue-green and blue in many places is Pliny the Elder.
Blue was referred to as the color of the sky or the color of the blue pigments used in painting, like ultramarine blue.
Green was referred to as "green like grass", "green like tree leaves" or "green like emeralds".
Blue-green was referred to as "green like the littoral sea", "green like turquoise" or "green like beryls".
This is especially obvious in the discussion about emeralds and beryls, which are identical but for their color, the former being green and the latter blue-green.
Similarly, in Latin "red" was used for both red and purple, but the two colors were distinguished as "red like crimson dye" (beetle-based dye) and "red like purple dye" (snail-based dye).
This is a misunderstanding of how language works. Words don't have any "true" meaning. A word exists to convey an idea from a speaker to a listener. If at that moment the intended meaning is conveyed, that is the word's true meaning at that point in time.
When I say "cyan" and a listener pictures a light color whose hue is around 180° similar to the sky on a clear day, then neither one of us is confused and the correct information has been transmitted from one brain to another.
Whether some long-dead Greeks would have used that same blob of phonemes to convey a different spectral idea is irrelevant. When you said "turquoise", but did you mean to convey "from Turkey"? When you said "beetle", did you mean to convey "little biter" or an insect? Probably not.
Ofc the modern usage is not necessarily a "confusion" because of an older meaning, maybe that's bothering people, but I read it as tongue-in-cheek.
I prefer "turquoise" anyway, which is more common in German for blue-greenish colors.
Because I have seen on HN extremely frequently downvotes that just show that the downvoters are ignorant about what they downvote. I stopped a long time ago to downvote comments.
Now I either upvote when I agree and otherwise I write a comment explaining why I disagree.
It would have been better if others had followed such a policy.
Perhaps the downvoter had something to say about "cyan", but this is indeed only one example of a long list of Ancient Greek words that have been borrowed into English during the 19th and 20th century, but which are used with incorrect meanings. Most likely this is due to the fact that those who have introduced these words did not study the Ancient Greek language and they also did not consult anyone knowledgeable or any good dictionaries. Another example of this kind is "macro" used as an opposite for "micro", i.e. as "big", while the true opposite of "micro" is "mega" = "big", while "macro" means "long", the opposite of "short" ("brachy" in Ancient Greek).
This, it commonly gets reposted on reddit and the colorblind sub, but it's basically worthless because most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green and forcing them to choose one or the other doesn't give you any valuable information.
For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
The results said "Your boundary is at hue 179, bluer than 82% of the population. For you, turquoise is green." and definitely if I was judging the boundary on a gradient, I'd have placed the line a bit further to the right.
This kind of site / demo does none of the above, and so can't even be trusted for directional effects (the direction of response may simple be due to the type of people responding, etc).
You need to get into either fishing (chartreuse lures are common) or cocktails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) .
(I mostly think about colours in Hue-Saturation-Value terms, and a hue wheel of blue-cyan-green-yellow-orange-red-purple)
I still refuse to believe that purple and violet are different colors.
When you finish the test it even tells you if you consider turquoise blue or green.
Like, I'd be interested to see if where my boundaries between blue and cyan, or cyan and green, are compared to the rest of the population.
But there's a whole other color between blue and green! A color that is primary under the subtractive CMYK model.
And it's an even bigger difference than with orange, because while red and yellow are 60° apart on the color wheel so that orange is 30° from each, blue and green are a full 120° apart on the color wheel, with cyan being 60° from each. So it's actually even worse -- it's as bad/nonsensical as showing yellow and asking if yellow is red or green.
So don't be upset, it's just for fun :)
Also, as it happens, I feel like cyan is just not really in our everyday vocabulary if you’re assigning colors to everyday objects. Maybe it’s because it’s rare to see something truly that bright and saturated. I feel like in practice I would end up just saying “blue-green” more than cyan, turquoise, teal, etc.
Just as all other modern schooling, the teaching of colors is done deliberately order to dumb down children and starve them from their natural ability to learn.
A child will learn at least dozens, if not hundreds of colors, if they are allowed to and taught. This has a real impact, because unless you learn this, it can be very difficult as an adult to be able to actually see the difference between colors.
But instead idiots make toys with only simple prime colors, and even playgrounds. Even though children themselves prefer more diverse and interesting color schemes.
Although after a few dozen color names, I think children are more benefitted by learning more about color theory such as physical paint mixing, digital mixing like RGB and HSL, and physical light effects on colours.
(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.
"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.
A server error has occurred
FUNCTION_INVOCATION_FAILED
sfo1::qcpj5-1777386477345-b792e22509f4In the developer console I see a CORS error for an attempt to load an SVG component from a CDN; I wonder if the dev pushed out a bad update
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.
IIRC from when I moved to Japan the first time (30+ y ago) when the old lights were standard, being a wildly curious Gaijin enough to ask "why" about these kinds of strange contradictions, and having lots of exposure in that time to senior citizens who had the spare time and inclination to humor my incessant questions, several of these octogenarian to centarians remembered the introduction of the first gen traffic lights, when the automobile became common enough to require them; and this seeming contradiction was new; this was the explanation I have heard common across several distinct conversations in different towns:
1. 緑 "midori" as a character and word for green was not very common usage before the end of WWII.
2. The (pre-LED) lamps for all three were yellow bulbs viewed through glass filters that were 'red', 'clear-somewhat yellow', and 'blue' - so even though it may appear green, the blue was for the color of the glass.
Also because 青い "aoi" has persisted in use for certain shades of 'green' - for example green apples and leafy fresh veggies; so this 'blue' seems to match the actual color of the light and has an implicit meaning for Japanese - in the sense of 'go while light is still fresh' - and Japanese humor is primarily Punny instead of being actually Funny, so this double meaning resonates even after switching to truly green LED light sources.
ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
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.
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.
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-...
I think the intent here is clear in context.
I had actually a very hard time to answer the questions, needed to overlay most of the color with some mostly white / light gray window and only squint at the color around it to decide. In the end my result was 176, which is almost the exact turning point for most people (and that even while my monitor is set to be more cold than default; but like said I had whatever my monitor shows as "white" to compare; even that "white" is likely technically slightly blue-ish).
Color perception is anyway much more influenced by contrasts then anything else. (Likely similar to acoustic tones, which are very hard to name / locate absolutely than when comparing to some reference tone.)
Besides the things mentioned in the about popup, blue is AFAIK the color we have the most receptors for. So it's imho quite "natural" that most people perceive cyan—which is technically the exact middle—as blue-ish, and of course the color left to it, turquoise, is green-ish (and as it seems, for most people, the mentioned turning point).
Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/
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.
The last few generations of most everything have been rated "Visually Indistinguishable From Perfect", so it seems they don't test as much anymore.
It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
The Cambridge Rugby blue which pre-dates the Boating blue is also more properly blue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_University_R.U.F.C.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
Orange is its own color, but is this hue it 51% red or 51% yellow?
I got 80 which is close enough, I think it’s really only the extremes that are meaningful. I tried simply alternating green-blue etc and got 60. I think adding some randomness and taking more samples (more questions) would help - I was worried that the prior color left a residual effect as a relative comparison was easier than absolute comparison. The extra random samples could help give an idea of confidence in that middle zone.
By the way, my comment is entirely in jest.
I would struggle to have to choose between only the words "red" and "yellow" to describe orange colours. Except for the orange fruit. I'm happy calling those yellow.
But the YCombinator logo? Yellowish red?
Why does 'turquoise' or 'orange' being labeled as a distinct colors, mean that they are not on the scale between two other colors?
Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
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. ;)
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.
:/
If you're going to go with linguistic self-report and a single item, you really want something like an 11-point Likert scale. A smart design might get e.g. a person's rating of "blue-ness vs. green-ness" on an 11-point scale, then determine the optimal cutpoint via e.g. clustering, logistic regression, or some other method, to really get something meaningful.
* They refer to specific objects (a duck and a stone), eventually these referents can be transcended though, like with the case of orange. * Their frequency is roughly similar to each other (along with cyan, aqua, etc.), so there's no one term for this range (e.g. there's no doubt in a corpus of English that red is the basic color term for its spectrum).
For some people "pink" does not exist as a concept, it is "light red". In English we talk about "light blue", but an Italian may talk about azzurro (galazio (γαλάζιο) in Greek; kachol (כחול) in Hebrew). Is azzurro its own colour different from "blue" for everyone, or only for Italians? Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
Before the different word of "turquoise" was created, did the colour still exist and/or be perceived?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turquoise#Names
If a language/culture does not have a word for "blue" does that mean the colour does not exist?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...
Where does "white" end and "grey" begin? Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_white
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_gray
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_black
Also, a bit of fun with brown:
> Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
No, it's a different word for it.
> Where does "white" end and "grey" begin?
When any amount of black is added to white.
> Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?
When the color is 100% black.
White and black are not the same as red, green, or blue. Tinting or shading a color with white or black does not change the color, it lightens or darkens it. That's not the same for RGB. Combining those results in other colors, regardless if a culture has a specific name for it.
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.
I feel like using only RGB values to define 'aqua' is a bit reductive as it is merely a specification in a specific environment trying to render a type of color but with inherent limitations such as not being able to reproduce the whole spectrum, color accuracy on the display, etc. etc. there's a lot of other parameters along with your own individual color perception that goes beyond "it's equal values blue and green within the RGB color-space"
But then as I list all these things I think I arrive at the same conclusion as you, it feels like a dumb false choice haha
If you say the trolley is blue, it goes straight, where there's a baby in the tracks. If the trolley is green, two grandmas die.
Even if aqua is neither more green or more blue, wouldn't it be interesting if when given the choice, the outcome leans toward green or blue to a statistically significant degree? or perhaps that there are differences in how it's perceived based on measurable factors like geography, wealth, height, weight, etc?
Collecting data is how we learn, and discover new things. Even if it seems dumb to you.
In fact, the argument that “what we experience doesn’t matter” looks incongruous insofar as it is made by an entity experiencing something and in fact because said entity is experiencing something—the entity has no access to anything but experience.
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)
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
Note: I'm not sure this is formulated well, or even if I am able to articulate this correctly.
At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?
Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.
My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.
Look into aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), anendophasia (lack of inner voice).
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
Is it the Rp2000 and Rp50000 that get mixed up? They seem obvious in that picture but it might be harder to tell them apart in low light.
Well, it's true that that's how we got the color term "orange".
It's not true that words that refer specifically to a color, as opposed to metaphorically referring to the color of the noun that is the primary meaning of the word, are rare. They're not rare in modern languages, and they also aren't rare in ancient languages. Your parent comment is mistaken.
Compare e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... [only meaning: "red"], but note that this is normal.
It wants to do a binary search in the color space to find "The Boundary" between your personal concept of green and your personal concept of blue.
No such boundary exists. If you abandon the idea of binary search and just present a bunch of similar colors in no particular order, you'll get more realistic results, which look like "you called color x 'blue' x% of the time, and 'green' (1-x)% of the time". You could even display a grayscale histogram of the blue-green continuum according to the odds of any particular point on it being labeled "blue" or "green". That would be fun.
The framing seems stupid if you take the naive perspective that your language's way of dividing colors is the only valid one. Exercises like this and discussions that follow help expand perspectives.
> I wouldn't assume most people do that.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
The added complexity is their currency is like paper, so it wears, fades, tears, and marks. Furthermore, there are so many zeroes. Their sizes are all identical or similar. Different generations of the notes are in use, some better than others. Indonesians also use "," as the decimal indicator, and "." as the thousands separator; in practice, both are intermixed with no sense or reason, sometimes even in the same paragraph, even on banking websites <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Indonesian/Lessons/Number...>, often due to misconfigured locale settings on computers (expect to see red spellcheck underlines on everything on Indonesian office computers).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_Indonesian_ru...>
<https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.a04f7812fd4ef0b773c7b081206bc28c...>
<https://img.freepik.com/premium-photo/new-rupiah-issued-2022...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/WC177J/a-pile-of-crumpled-indonesi...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/D17MR1/background-of-indonesia-mon...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/JN9ANB/close-up-picture-of-indones...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2CXNYGJ/indonesia-money-isolated-b...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2KBJ4H6/semarang-indonesia-novembe...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2T13B4R/stock-photo-of-indonesian-...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2R5K0NE/new-series-of-rupiah-bankn...>
I could say 0,255,255 is aqua but that doesn't really mean anything beyond digital color space, so why even use that as a metric for how green or blue something is beyond a perfectly color-accurate digital display using RGB as a colorspace? "Blue green" in plain English is not solely the 0,255,255 "blue green" that is in RGB space, it's like you narrowed it down to just that and ignored everything else
I get that our subjective definitions can be different, but in this case the subjective differences suggest a difference in objective understanding of color (and countries apparently.)
p.s. I am color vision handicapped or whatever that is called.
This is also how native English speakers (with color vision) view pink and red. Compare the classic dialogue from Red vs Blue ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCwYfSeqAw8#t=47 ):
Look at it! It's not pink! It's like a... a lightish red.
Guess what. They already have a color for lightish red. You know what it's called? PINK.
It is extremely unlikely that any of those who introduced these words in English chose intentionally to use them for other things than for what they had been used for millennia.
For a modern user, it is no longer a confusion to use such words in their currently widespread sense. When speaking to others, I also use such words with their current meaning, in order to be understood.
Nevertheless, it is good to know their original meanings, especially when reading older texts, which may use those meanings. I have seen a lot of ridiculous claims about texts written in the Antiquity, or even about some texts written a couple of centuries ago, where those who had read those texts had been mislead by believing that the words had the same meaning as in modern English.
Especially about the colors known by ancient people, e.g about the Ancient Greeks, there have been many fantastic theories, e.g. that the Ancient Greeks did not know blue or brown, when already in the Iliad of Homer there are a lot of instances of words meaning "blue" (= "the color of the ultramarine blue pigment") or "brown" (= "the color of burnt wood").
Thanks for elaborating. So not tongue-in-cheek at all.
Dad: Hey, what rig did we catch that king on?
Me: Live pogey with a chartreuse minnow.
I thought it was green though.
వ
Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.
I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?
IMO, growing up, unless you lived under a rock, it seems obvious to me that you will have experienced different people pointing at the same colour and uttering very different colour labels (pink vs. red, blue vs. green, black vs. deep blue/purple, etc) from the labels you might have applied yourself. Differing/shared colour perception isn't exactly a rare kind of topic (almost is like the canonical stoner topic, also common online), so I'd be a bit surprised if this demo is actually introducing anyone to this concept already. Any excitement is surely from other implications people think the demo has.
But unfortunately there are no interesting implications from what this site shows. Yes, it demonstrates the boring fact that: "it isn't clear how different people assign different color labels to the same physical stimuli" (and yes, this is FALSELY assuming that everyone's monitors/screens are the same too), but if you didn't already know this... I'm not sure exactly what social context you could have possibly grown up in.
We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
And you would get some number arguing how "several" is a distinct category in the same way this post has people talking about cyan.
But what does this mean? Only vantablack is black, everything else is grey?
It’s like $200 and it’s not worth it unless you do color sensitive work (photo editing, printing or video editing) and you have an expensive monitor or expensive laptop with good color support. Many monitors will fail so badly the calibration won’t be able to fix it.
But if you’ve ever had a lot of trouble trying to get colors to match when printing or between devices, it could be a godsend, although it’s only one of the many reasons colors might not match.
I wonder if photo stores might have the device, and if they would loan it. I'm surprised there is no method of calibration against common objects of known colour, such as Euro bills.
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=black%2Cwhite%...
[2] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Red%2Cgreen%2Cyellow%2Cb...
"English" isn't one monolith. Every English speaker speaks their own version, some closer to each other than others, and new features are constantly being added or removed.
Words meanings shift over time in all languages. And when languages take sounds from other languages, they also regularly shift their meanings.
Linguists call this “semantic drift” and it occurs in every language we know of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change
Wikipedias first English example is:
Awful – Literally "full of awe", originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)", hence "impressive". In contemporary usage, the word means "extremely bad".
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.
That's sorta not true, it's just a quirk of language development. If they only have one word that covers both, they use additional words to describe the actual shade they're talking about.
This is the same character that's used for Japanese traffic lights when foreigners find it funny that they call obviously green lights "blue".
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-li...
For this, you just lost The Game.
I would assume we don’t, simply because nerves are reproduced biologically, but I’m not a neuroscientist.
[0] Is my "red" your "red"?: Evaluating structural correspondences between color similarity judgments using unsupervised alignment https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40124475/
If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?
That path leads down to solipsism which is not very intersting
Same with "firmware". If our brains process the data differently, then our actual perception might vary in (eventually, I would hope) real-world measurable ways.
There's a philosophical school of thought (which I share) that there's no coherent definition.
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...
It's the purists who believe that original meanings are the only possibly correct ones that need to stick to old English. Or perhaps even old Norse.
I think there's another set of questions here -- why is "blue-green family" a thing in your mind, rather than "blue-yellow family"? Is there a "red-blue family"? "Orange-blue"?
Also, yellow-blue and red-green are opponents that can't be mixed because of how our retinas preprocess the signals from cones. Therefore, you obviously end up with blue-green (cyan), red-yellow (orange), yellow-green (lime) and blue-red (magenta, which actually doesn't exist on the light spectrum) families of related colors.
Russian speakers broadly consider sky blue / turquoise / cyan a distinct color right between green and blue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
Although the question "is the color distinct and basic or just a shade?" is very subjective. Is pink distinct or a shade of red/purple? Is purple distinct or a shade of red/blue? Is green distinct or a shade of blue? (it's well-known that in Japanese green separated from blue only relatively recently, with very bluish traffic lights and other quirks included)
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.
Realistically there is a broad range that we all can acknowledge is neither, but is instead teal, and forcing a binary choice means people just choose randomly.
Once I figured it, I tried it 2 more times ... and got different results :) but the new results were consistent.
But it cannot do that without bias, since people always have the third choice to drop out when they don't like their choices. There is also another bias, which is people will just select some random option when they want to say something equivalent to "blue-green" but don't have the choice, then they get a result biased in that direction but what has actually happened is they have given up. This random choice might be culturally biased towards people's preferred color. I personally selected green when that occurred for me and then just sat on green hammering that. Oh, I'm more willing to say green than other people? Meaningless, I wouldn't have called those colors green in a conversation.
When presented in a forum people also have the choice of criticising the false dichotomy which is what you are experiencing here. The point of posting it here is to get this sort of feedback, so...
I think the test can be fairly criticised on the basis that it is assuming everyone's psychological colour space has a discrete boundary between blue and green, which clearly isn't the case for some people (like you), but it is for others (like me).
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
I’m sure you’ve had conversations where that’s the answer you want to give.
