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There's a genuine military use for colour-blind people. They're better at detecting camouflage than trichromats.
by yarg 4y ago
There's a genuine military use for colour-blind people.
They're better at detecting camouflage than trichromats.
- sandworm101 4y agoBut not in the trade for which I had applied. Any trade involving extensive maps/charts, and everything associated with aircraft, are usually closed to those suffering common forms of colorblindness.
- Rediscover 4y agoTell me about it. During basic training (1983) the sgt was introducing us to camouflage. Something like "Out there are twenty soldiers hiding and you can't see them!" Me: Raises hand, "Permission to speak? Yeah, there's one there, and there, and over there..." Sgt: "Your colorblind, right? Drop and start pushing the ground down until I'm tired."
- mcv 4y agoAnd after pushing the ground I hope he made you the designated camouflaged-enemy spotter? This is a really cool superpower to have. I honestly had no idea that this was a thing, but I guess it makes sense; colour blind people do see colour, but they see it in a different way, which could be leveraged to spot things people with normal vision don't. I guess that also means that every squad should have one colour blind person, and camouflage should be designed to foil colour blind people too. Of course there are different kinds of colourblindness, which makes things more complicated.
- Rediscover 4y agoYes, designated for that and night patrols (I used to have spectacular low-light vision).
- ben_w 4y ago> Drop and start pushing the ground down until I'm tired. I've never understood, and feel I have no intuition for, responses like this. What's the value added by this? Any excuse for exercise? Internalising that the sergeant is always right even when they're wrong? Or is "permission to speak" just a Hollywood affectation not really present in the military?
- Rediscover 4y agoYou are correct. Any excuse for exercise and dominance (sgt is always right) in basic training. The "permission to speak" is to train discipline and to prevent chaos. After basic, it pretty much goes away except in outstanding circumstances (eg, addressing a very high ranking individual).
- Out_of_Characte 4y agoYou have a very good moral compass for perceived injustice. But theres nothing wrong with someone in the militairy doing push ups. There IS something wrong with questioning authority because you can see campuflaged soldiers, which was probaly the training other recruits were supposed to be doing but some smartass with good colorblind eyes ruined it for them.
- hnbad 4y agoTechnically, soldiers absolutely are (legally) required to question authority in some cases (e.g. if they think an order is immoral, like participating in a genocide or murdering civilians or torture). In practice it provides more utility to stomp out any desire to challenge or question authority though because if a soldier spends time critically thinking about an order they're given, that's time they're not spending being highly alert or implementing that order.
- ben_w 4y ago> But theres nothing wrong with someone in the militairy doing push ups. Sure, it's the "until I get tired" (emphasis mine) part that's the main surprise to me. The extremity, more than the specific exercise.
- thejackgoode 4y agoI lost a link to the study, but I read somewhere that color blindness is a feature that lets you see colors better during twilight, and lion share of it is registered in folks in more northern population (white and mostly men) where average twilight is the longest.