5 ms·

And yet men will not be able to tell the difference. I have a flat with white painted walls, or so I thought... until a woman told me they were cream, milk and

And yet men will not be able to tell the difference. I have a flat with white painted walls, or so I thought... until a woman told me they were cream, milk and eggshell :-/

themitigating 4y ago
Maybe you can tell the difference but to express your masculinity pretend not to. Why? Because caring and beauty are feminine.
- sircastor 4y ago
  Familiarity with these sorts of decorative details are often considered to a non-masculine trait. Though I suspect that most of the time it’s just that some people don’t care. And it’s possible that tracks with gender norms, but I think it’s probably that many men don’t feel like they’re allowed to care. A reminder that you’re allowed to care about whatever you want.
- jwestbury 4y ago
  This is a complicated subject. Color perception is influenced by culture[0], so how someone is raised can impact their ability to discern color differences. It's quite possible that men in (Western|American) cultures are raised in such a way that their color perception is more limited than that of women despite no biological differences. Of course, there's plenty of research[1] showing women are better at color discrimination than men. 0. https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/how-we-perceive-colour-depends-our-culture-and-language-prof-anna-franklin https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga... 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21675035/#:~:text=Color%20wise%20also%2C%20females%20gave,shades%20of%20colors%20than%20males https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21675035/#:~:text=Color%20wi....
  - phicoh 4y ago
    I wonder what the effect is of language. If on average men know only a few names of colors, then how can they remember or talk about the variations in between?
  - S_Bear 4y ago
    I started painting miniatures again a few years ago and my appreciation (and vocabulary) for colors has dramatically expanded, especially when I started mixing primaries from scratch. I literally see the world in a different, richer way. I wish I would have realized this sooner. Maybe gutting art programs in American public schools was a bad idea.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      I can second this: spend a lot of time working with subtle color variations (not just frequency, but the various matte/shiny bits). I learned I LOVE highly saturated colors. Recent car paint was also a revelation to me (https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/why-do-new-cars-look-like-this https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/why-do-new-cars-look-lik...).
- rayiner 4y ago
  There is a biological difference in color perception, as well as hearing and smell: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/body-odd/men-women-really-do-see-world-differently-flna978565 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/body-odd/men-women-really-do-... > Abramov explained in a statement these elements of vision are linked to specific sets of thalamic neurons in the brain's primary visual cortex. The development of these neurons is controlled by male sex hormones called androgens when the embryo is developing into a fetus.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    here's the actual science paper, which is always less exciting than the public press. https://bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2042-6410-3-21 https://bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2042-6410-3-2...
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  So... everyone that works with graphic design is feminine?
- msm_ 4y ago
  > Because caring and beauty are feminine. Is this something you (or people you're familiar with) believe? Never encountered this norm before.
  - yowzadave 4y ago
    I believe the comment was meant as an ironic dismissal of GP's assertion that men can't tell the difference between colors, but women can. As an architect, I can confirm that there are many men who know the difference between cream/milk/eggshell!
    - brookst 4y ago
      This is true, and we should be suspicious of gender stereotypes. But it is also true that on average men are worse at seeing color gradations, just because the incidence of color deficiency is 10x higher in men. So any particular man may see color as well as any particular woman, but if you had to pick one person at random to save the world in the galactic color identification game show, you’d best pick a woman.
doikor 4y ago
A lot of people have a terrible conception of what proper white is. Often what many think of as white is white mixed with blue. This is super evident after properly calibrating the white point of a (good) TV. Most casual viewers will say that the whites are now yellow/orange but in reality they are just used to always looking at white with a lot of blue mixed in. I've had similar experience with a interior designer friend of mine who told me my new white walls were not white but cream. I have a spectrophotometer that pretty clearly said that my walls were closer to white then his walls that he insisted were proper white (they were white mixed with blue)
- sp332 4y ago
  Are you calibrating the TV to 5000k when they expect 6000k?
  - doikor 4y ago
    6500K is what one should be calibrating for. A TV straight from the shop in some cases is more like 7500 or 8000K or even more (well into the blue range) Most content is mastered for this 6500K as that is what the D65 standard is and the tv/film standards like Rec709 and Rec2020 use D65.
    - morcheeba 4y ago
      There are also cultural differences, too. Asian companies preferred colder whites, while our US customer wanted a warmer white. We were told this made the different skin tones more attractive.
- jwestbury 4y ago
  > Often what many think of as white is white mixed with blue. This is super evident after properly calibrating the white point of a (good) TV. Most casual viewers will say that the whites are now yellow/orange but in reality they are just used to always looking at white with a lot of blue mixed in. "White" is tricky, because it's dependent on color temperature of the light which is illuminating the given surface. If someone is used to viewing white objects under daylight, but you're calibrating their TV to match the color temperature of their indoor environment (which proper calibration should do), then the "white" displayed on their TV will be a fundamentally different color from the "white" they see reflected off a white surface outside. This effect is going to be found to be doubly true if you're calibrating to indoor lighting in the evening, but they watch their TV at noon in the daylight with the windows open -- because the color temperature of the environment will now be much higher than the color temperature of the screen.
wjnc 4y ago
So we recently went from RAL 9010 to RAL 9016 for the walls (with colours and walls to create a nice atmosphere) and to my horror the difference between the RAL 9001 (cream) doors and frames is suddenly unbearable. This coming from a person who has a hard time naming the less than basic colours. Not to get me started on the millions of colours you paint your walls in. I did have a laugh when I found out that proprietary paint colours are a big thing, a few weeks after reading on HN about Adobe "cancelling" a colour. Proprietary colours are a thing I can suddenly talk about with repair guys. Car paints are proprietary. Kitchen panel paints are proprietary. It's a whole new world. It's not just RGB, there's gloss and sparkle to consider.
jjulius 4y ago
... just men?
dekhn 4y ago
This seems like an unnecessary stereotype to state in a comment on Hacker News.
- fwlr 4y ago
  So there’s these three sets of cells in the eye, each tuned to a different wavelength of light, and the difference in relative activations of each cell type in response to a given light is what provides color information. Which wavelength each set of cells is tuned to varies quite a bit person to person. If your wavelength “tunings” for two types of cells are too close together, then there’s less relative difference in their activation for any given wavelength of light, and thus - in the most rigorous information-theoretic sense - there is literally less color information available. We pick an arbitrary threshold of diminished color information and call that CVD, color vision deficiency. Depending on which threshold you pick for CVD, males are anywhere from 10 to 20 to 50 _times_ more likely to have it than females. Of course, this “has / does not have CVD” binary is an artifact of us picking a threshold; the real underlying mechanism is that the distribution of wavelength tunings in the male population is much more heavily weighted towards “overlapping”. Put another way, you have two overlapping bell curves of “how much color information can your eye cells theoretically generate” and if you drop a single point on that graph you can capture 1% of females and 10% of males to the left of it (for that 10x figure), or 0.02% of females and 1% of males to the left of the chosen point (for that 50x figure), or anywhere in between. And the fact that you can do this tells us the two bell curves very likely have different means and standard deviations. The search term is “spectral sensitivity” if you’re interested in finding out more. (I do know that “but it’s true” isn’t considered to be a good rebuttal to “it’s a stereotype”, but it kinda seems like it should be, and I don’t really know why it isn’t. Also, as someone with extreme CVD, color vision is just a fantastically interesting topic regardless of sex differences. The way those EnChroma glasses that “treat” color vision deficiency work is they block out a small section of the light wavelengths where CVD tends to have high overlap. This artificially increases the relative difference in activation, meaning the brain can extract more color data, with the practical result that people with CVD put on these glasses and see colors with an intensity they’ve never seen before. But it gets even cooler! For instance, did you know if we develop the technology to directly stimulate those different wavelength receptors independently of each other, we can make those receptors report “differences in relative activation” that are literally impossible to achieve with any combination of light wavelengths? That is, the cells will happily report perfectly well-formed color data to the brain, except that it’s data in a range that no brain has ever received before. The visual cortex seems like it does fairly general information processing, at least at the lower levels before we start tagging that information with e.g. emotional responses or linguistic names, so on some level our brain would probably be able to make immediate sense of this previously “out of band” information. It must be able to do so, or else CVD sufferers wouldn’t get such vivid reactions to EnChroma glasses. So it’s very plausible that this procedure would instantly unlock actual “new color experiences” for everyone. How cool is that?)

And yet men will not be able to tell the difference. I have a flat with white painted walls, or so I thought... until a woman told me they were cream, milk and eggshell :-/

themitigating 4y ago

Maybe you can tell the difference but to express your masculinity pretend not to. Why? Because caring and beauty are feminine.

sircastor 4y ago
Familiarity with these sorts of decorative details are often considered to a non-masculine trait. Though I suspect that most of the time it’s just that some people don’t care. And it’s possible that tracks with gender norms, but I think it’s probably that many men don’t feel like they’re allowed to care. A reminder that you’re allowed to care about whatever you want.
jwestbury 4y ago
This is a complicated subject. Color perception is influenced by culture[0], so how someone is raised can impact their ability to discern color differences. It's quite possible that men in (Western|American) cultures are raised in such a way that their color perception is more limited than that of women despite no biological differences. Of course, there's plenty of research[1] showing women are better at color discrimination than men. 0. https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/how-we-perceive-colour-depends-our-culture-and-language-prof-anna-franklin https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga... 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21675035/#:~:text=Color%20wise%20also%2C%20females%20gave,shades%20of%20colors%20than%20males https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21675035/#:~:text=Color%20wi....
- phicoh 4y ago
  I wonder what the effect is of language. If on average men know only a few names of colors, then how can they remember or talk about the variations in between?
- S_Bear 4y ago
  I started painting miniatures again a few years ago and my appreciation (and vocabulary) for colors has dramatically expanded, especially when I started mixing primaries from scratch. I literally see the world in a different, richer way. I wish I would have realized this sooner. Maybe gutting art programs in American public schools was a bad idea.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I can second this: spend a lot of time working with subtle color variations (not just frequency, but the various matte/shiny bits). I learned I LOVE highly saturated colors. Recent car paint was also a revelation to me (https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/why-do-new-cars-look-like-this https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/why-do-new-cars-look-lik...).
rayiner 4y ago
There is a biological difference in color perception, as well as hearing and smell: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/body-odd/men-women-really-do-see-world-differently-flna978565 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/body-odd/men-women-really-do-... > Abramov explained in a statement these elements of vision are linked to specific sets of thalamic neurons in the brain's primary visual cortex. The development of these neurons is controlled by male sex hormones called androgens when the embryo is developing into a fetus.
- dekhn 4y ago
  here's the actual science paper, which is always less exciting than the public press. https://bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2042-6410-3-21 https://bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2042-6410-3-2...
kayodelycaon 4y ago
So... everyone that works with graphic design is feminine?
msm_ 4y ago
> Because caring and beauty are feminine. Is this something you (or people you're familiar with) believe? Never encountered this norm before.
- yowzadave 4y ago
  I believe the comment was meant as an ironic dismissal of GP's assertion that men can't tell the difference between colors, but women can. As an architect, I can confirm that there are many men who know the difference between cream/milk/eggshell!
  - brookst 4y ago
    This is true, and we should be suspicious of gender stereotypes. But it is also true that on average men are worse at seeing color gradations, just because the incidence of color deficiency is 10x higher in men. So any particular man may see color as well as any particular woman, but if you had to pick one person at random to save the world in the galactic color identification game show, you’d best pick a woman.

doikor 4y ago

A lot of people have a terrible conception of what proper white is. Often what many think of as white is white mixed with blue. This is super evident after properly calibrating the white point of a (good) TV. Most casual viewers will say that the whites are now yellow/orange but in reality they are just used to always looking at white with a lot of blue mixed in. I've had similar experience with a interior designer friend of mine who told me my new white walls were not white but cream. I have a spectrophotometer that pretty clearly said that my walls were closer to white then his walls that he insisted were proper white (they were white mixed with blue)

sp332 4y ago
Are you calibrating the TV to 5000k when they expect 6000k?
- doikor 4y ago
  6500K is what one should be calibrating for. A TV straight from the shop in some cases is more like 7500 or 8000K or even more (well into the blue range) Most content is mastered for this 6500K as that is what the D65 standard is and the tv/film standards like Rec709 and Rec2020 use D65.
  - morcheeba 4y ago
    There are also cultural differences, too. Asian companies preferred colder whites, while our US customer wanted a warmer white. We were told this made the different skin tones more attractive.
jwestbury 4y ago
> Often what many think of as white is white mixed with blue. This is super evident after properly calibrating the white point of a (good) TV. Most casual viewers will say that the whites are now yellow/orange but in reality they are just used to always looking at white with a lot of blue mixed in. "White" is tricky, because it's dependent on color temperature of the light which is illuminating the given surface. If someone is used to viewing white objects under daylight, but you're calibrating their TV to match the color temperature of their indoor environment (which proper calibration should do), then the "white" displayed on their TV will be a fundamentally different color from the "white" they see reflected off a white surface outside. This effect is going to be found to be doubly true if you're calibrating to indoor lighting in the evening, but they watch their TV at noon in the daylight with the windows open -- because the color temperature of the environment will now be much higher than the color temperature of the screen.

wjnc 4y ago

So we recently went from RAL 9010 to RAL 9016 for the walls (with colours and walls to create a nice atmosphere) and to my horror the difference between the RAL 9001 (cream) doors and frames is suddenly unbearable. This coming from a person who has a hard time naming the less than basic colours. Not to get me started on the millions of colours you paint your walls in. I did have a laugh when I found out that proprietary paint colours are a big thing, a few weeks after reading on HN about Adobe "cancelling" a colour. Proprietary colours are a thing I can suddenly talk about with repair guys. Car paints are proprietary. Kitchen panel paints are proprietary. It's a whole new world. It's not just RGB, there's gloss and sparkle to consider.

jjulius 4y ago

... just men?

dekhn 4y ago

This seems like an unnecessary stereotype to state in a comment on Hacker News.

fwlr 4y ago
So there’s these three sets of cells in the eye, each tuned to a different wavelength of light, and the difference in relative activations of each cell type in response to a given light is what provides color information. Which wavelength each set of cells is tuned to varies quite a bit person to person. If your wavelength “tunings” for two types of cells are too close together, then there’s less relative difference in their activation for any given wavelength of light, and thus - in the most rigorous information-theoretic sense - there is literally less color information available. We pick an arbitrary threshold of diminished color information and call that CVD, color vision deficiency. Depending on which threshold you pick for CVD, males are anywhere from 10 to 20 to 50 _times_ more likely to have it than females. Of course, this “has / does not have CVD” binary is an artifact of us picking a threshold; the real underlying mechanism is that the distribution of wavelength tunings in the male population is much more heavily weighted towards “overlapping”. Put another way, you have two overlapping bell curves of “how much color information can your eye cells theoretically generate” and if you drop a single point on that graph you can capture 1% of females and 10% of males to the left of it (for that 10x figure), or 0.02% of females and 1% of males to the left of the chosen point (for that 50x figure), or anywhere in between. And the fact that you can do this tells us the two bell curves very likely have different means and standard deviations. The search term is “spectral sensitivity” if you’re interested in finding out more. (I do know that “but it’s true” isn’t considered to be a good rebuttal to “it’s a stereotype”, but it kinda seems like it should be, and I don’t really know why it isn’t. Also, as someone with extreme CVD, color vision is just a fantastically interesting topic regardless of sex differences. The way those EnChroma glasses that “treat” color vision deficiency work is they block out a small section of the light wavelengths where CVD tends to have high overlap. This artificially increases the relative difference in activation, meaning the brain can extract more color data, with the practical result that people with CVD put on these glasses and see colors with an intensity they’ve never seen before. But it gets even cooler! For instance, did you know if we develop the technology to directly stimulate those different wavelength receptors independently of each other, we can make those receptors report “differences in relative activation” that are literally impossible to achieve with any combination of light wavelengths? That is, the cells will happily report perfectly well-formed color data to the brain, except that it’s data in a range that no brain has ever received before. The visual cortex seems like it does fairly general information processing, at least at the lower levels before we start tagging that information with e.g. emotional responses or linguistic names, so on some level our brain would probably be able to make immediate sense of this previously “out of band” information. It must be able to do so, or else CVD sufferers wouldn’t get such vivid reactions to EnChroma glasses. So it’s very plausible that this procedure would instantly unlock actual “new color experiences” for everyone. How cool is that?)