6 ms·

I think this is flawed. You quickly end up on a color that's clearly not "blue" or "green" and you're unlikely to keep hitting "this is green" several times in

• jsharpe 2y ago
  Exactly my thoughts! Thanks for putting it so clearly.
• fsckboy 2y ago
  >I think this is flawed. You quickly end up on a color that's clearly not "blue" or "green" and you're unlikely to keep hitting "this is green" several times in a row, conceding that ok, fine, maybe this is blue, whatever. I agree with you, the whole thing is flawed when it could be better. When you ask the question "is my blue your blue?", you are evoking the old philosophical question, and it's a question about color perception, not words. This test did not test color perception, it tested "what word do you use?" I think of blue as a pure color, and green as a wide range of colors all the way to yellow, to me another pure color. so if there's any green at all in it, I'm going to call it green. (maybe it's left over from kindergarten blending "primary colors". also, while I like green grass, I don't like green as a color, so any green I see is a likely to make me think, ew, green) But in terms of what I see, I can only assume I'm seeing the same thing as everybody else is because the test is not testing it. Just because I call something green doesn't mean I don't see all the blue in it. >Edit: Possible improvements: changing the wording to "this is MORE green" and "this is MORE blue" and randomizing the order in which they are shown, somehow. I realize you're just doing some kind of binary search, narrowing the color range. yes, the test should show you pure blue, then a turquoise mix, then pure green, and a ... etc. It should also retest you on things you already answered to measure where you are consistent.
  • yarg 2y ago
    I do think that the philosophical question could potentially be approachable in a modern context; Show people a colour and map their brain activity - the level of similarity between two people's colour perceptions should be reflected by similarities in the activity.
    • lazide 2y ago
      Why do you think that would be the case? One persons ‘blue’ activity could be different than another’s while still being the same wavelength of light and general perception.
      • yarg 2y ago
        The philosophical question is not dealing with the objective external reality; It's a question of subjective experience - and that experience should be reflected in electrical activity. Given the fact that the broad structure of the brain is largely shared across members of the species, similar stimulation should trigger similar activity in the same regions of the brain. If the same colour triggers markedly different activities, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that the subjective experiences are not the same.
        • lazide 2y ago
          Except that’s literally not how humans are wired or develop - even nerve paths and other fine grained details in our bodies show significant divergence, and there are major macro level differences readily apparent even based on gender, color blindness, etc. Honestly, it would be shocking if it were even a little true beyond ‘frontal cortex’ levels of granularity. And even then, Phineas Gage type situations make it clear that may not actually be required either. And that means completely different individual activity can trigger similar subjective experiences as much as similar activity can trigger different subjective experiences, no?
          • yarg 2y ago
• yarg 2y ago
  I'd prefer blue/green/neither. With the third colour, I just thought "no, that's teal", and my decision was (as you suggested) semi-arbitrary.
  • dyauspitr 2y ago
    Then everything past the first blue would be neither and you wouldn’t have anything interesting. All those other colors are different shades of teal.
  • adamhartenz 2y ago
    but is the teal more green or blue. You should be able to answer that
    • yarg 2y ago
      Is zero more positive or negative? You should be able to answer that.
      • jdiff 2y ago
        More positive. -0 is more negative.
        • yarg 2y ago
          It's neutral (-1 * 0 ≡ +1 * 0); don't confuse it for an infinitesimal (which can be positive or negative).
          • lll-o-lll 2y ago
            Nah, zero definitely feels a bit more positive to me.
          • zeven7 2y ago
            I think they were referring to -0 in floating point, which does exist as a separate value from +0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed_zero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed_zero
• tptacek 2y ago
  One issue with it: I did it 3 times and got 3 very different results.
  • Retr0id 2y ago
    Likewise. I think for me there's quite a wide band of colours in the middle that I consider to be "neither/either", so I'm basically just picking a random answer for those. A modified version of the test that finds two boundaries (green/neither/blue) could be interesting. Or maybe it just needs to take more samples, in a more random order.
  • wzdd 2y ago
    Same. Some of them are neither obviously blue nor obviously green, so what the test was measuring for me was what I was thinking about at the time, the decision I'd previously made, whether my mouse was currently hovering over "blue" or "green", etc.
• adamhartenz 2y ago
  Yup, but at that level, you are not affecting the results very much. So it all works out
• pminimax 2y ago
  The order is randomized. Hit reset and you'll get a different sequence. The sequence is also adaptive (not a binary search---it's hitting specific points of the tail of a sigmoid in a logistic regression it's building as you go along). Try it a few times and you'll see how reproducible it is for you. It of course depends on the calibration of your monitor. One of the reasons I did this project is I wanted to see if there were systematic differences in color names and balance in the wild, for example, by device type (desktop vs. Android vs. iPhone), time of day (night mode), country (Sapir-Whorf), etc.
  • Rastonbury 2y ago
    These results would be interesting
  • lifthrasiir 2y ago
    The sequence itself should be converging however, right? I feel that there should be some random jumps outside of the current confidence interval so that contextual aspects can be filtered out or at least recognized.
    • isoprophlex 2y ago
      Yes, exactly this. Because it seems to be converging right now, I quickly get the feeling that there's no meaningful choice, after the first three prompts you end up with something that's neither green nor blue. Re-taking the test gave me a very different score. It might work better for me to do some contrastive questioning: show a definite green followed by an intermediary color, then a definite blue followed by an intermediate color.
      • wodenokoto 2y ago
        The whole point of asserting where your border between green and blue is, is to ask about colors that are in between the two. It doesn't make sense to ask is RGB(0,0,255) blue to you? Well, unless you are color blind it is.
• terryf 2y ago
  > and you're unlikely to keep hitting "this is green" several times in a row I did. Because it was green!
  • inymbuss 2y ago
    [dead]
• yread 2y ago
  Agreed. It would be more accurate to show the final gradient (without the curve) and let people choose where is the boundary. It wasn't even clear what the actual task is
• arendtio 2y ago
  Yeah, it felt like a trick question to me. Because the second color I saw was somewhat like turquoise and the site is called 'Is My Blue Your Blue,' I decided that everything that you say yes to colors would be blue and everything else would be green. I never saw a green until the result was displayed :D
• larschdk 2y ago
  I am unable to answer many of them. I see mostly turquoise, not blue or green.
• KaiserPro 2y ago
  VFX engineer here. Yes we used to cailbrate monitors and work in the dark. However one of the key people that built our colour pipeline was also colour blind, so its not actually a requirement, so long as you use the right tools. Most people aren't that sensitive to colour, especially if its out of context. a minority of people aren't that good at relative chromaticity as well (as in is this colour bluer/greener/redder than that one) But a lot of people are. Language affects how you perceive colour as well. But to say the experiment is flawed I think misses the nuance, which is capturing how people see colour _in the real world_. Sure some people will have truetone on, or some other daily colour balance fiddling. But thats still how people see the world as it is, rather than in isolation.
  • MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    I once worked for a company that had a designer who was color blind. He would always show up wearing the exact same outfit every day: turns out that he was REALLY color blind, and so he just gave up and bought 7 long sleeved shirts and 7 pants, all black. Didn't work out so well for him in the designs... most companies don't want monochrome websites.
• Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
  I definitely have the bias you mention. In my case I don't think it's mainly due to not wanting to push the same button many times in a row, but because I compare with the previous color, so if previously I was already somewhat unsure but I chose green and now it became slightly bluer, it "must" be blue, right? I think I can get over it, but it requires conscious effort and even then, who knows. Bias is often unconscious. Another possible improvement would be to alternate the binary search colors with some randomly-generated hues. Even if those answers are outright ignored, and the process becomes longer, I think they would help to alleviate that bias. At least you wouldn't be directly comparing to the previous color.