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I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", w
by percentcer 5mo ago
I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
- StilesCrisis 5mo agoI totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.
- jedmeyers 5mo agoSame here, it's often neither blue nor green, so this experiment is pointless.
- ajkjk 5mo agoI closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.
- SunshineTheCat 5mo ago100%. It's like being asked is this black or white and being shown 50% grey.
- reactordev 5mo agoThat’s the point of this. To find out where in that spectrum your vision lands, not to get a perfect score.
- xmprt 5mo agoOP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.
- reactordev 5mo agocorrectness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
- eikenberry 5mo agoIt should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.
- arcfour 5mo agoHuh. I consider cyan to be blue, but it turns out it's made by mixing equal parts of blue and green light on an RGB display. 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).
- p1necone 5mo agoyeah I've always thought of cyan as just "blue, but really bright", which does make sense - you're going from 0, 0, 100 (blue) to 0, 100, 100 (cyan) so it's twice as far from pure black. I also see pure cyan as being much more blue than green.
- ajkjk 5mo agoThere's no way for me to answer truthfully whether teal is blue or green. It is neither. Anything I give gives a false answer. The data is invalid.
- reactordev 5mo agoIncorrect, it either lies on the blue side or the green side, you must choose. Neither is not an option.
- D-Machine 5mo agoBut that is wrong. This doesn't test colour perception or vision, it tests verbal classification of colour perception into a forced binary. Everyone could be perceiving the colour qualia 100% identically, but simply choosing different linguistic cutpoints, meaning you can't say this is about vision / perception at all (it may just be about language use).
- kshacker 5mo agoI think the premise could be stated more clearly. It is a boolean choice. What do you think it is closer to. Once I figured it, I tried it 2 more times ... and got different results :) but the new results were consistent.
- D-Machine 5mo agoAgreed, there is no clear premise. Of course that different people looking at the same object will use different colour words is a triviality that anyone over, say, 10 years old knows. If that's the premise of the site, it is boring. People are getting excited because they think this implies something about differences in vision or perception... but it doesn't, that requires much more cleverness to test.
- reactordev 5mo agoOr suspension of expectations…
- BlackFly 5mo agoThe attempted point being to measure and compare how people classify colors between blue and green when given a false dichotomy between the two. 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...
- reactordev 5mo agoConjecture is precisely why you don’t understand the test. Bias is the point! Binary choice is how you derive it. No answer is not an answer. How do you not see this? Any conjecture on anything but the two options defeats the entire point of the test. The test is to find your bias towards blue or green. Cake or death.
- BlackFly 5mo agoI don't have the bias towards green that the "test" suggests for the very reason I pointed out. I and others understand the perspective of the test but you don't seem to understand how it fails to meet its own goal since you are caught up in browbeating people that are trying to explain it to you.
- miltonlost 5mo agoYeah, but is the gray to you more look more black or more white? That's the point.
- cubefox 5mo agoIt's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing. Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
- MattGaiser 5mo agoThat is the point of the exercise though. Is 50% really where you draw the line?
- mort96 5mo agoBut the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.
- miltonlost 5mo agobut when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?
- addaon 5mo agoI think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there. 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...
- tshaddox 5mo agoAre there really people whose language treats “cyan” and “turquoise” as distinct colors which are not in the “blue-green” family?
- tshaddox 5mo agoIt’s not really the same, because black and white strongly connote being at the far ends of their continuum (lightness), and are thus opposites, whereas blue and green are more vaguely specified as nearby spots on their continuum (hue).
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoThats the exact point of this experiment to define the inbetween and move it to either green or blue. :/
- antisthenes 5mo agoThat makes about as much sense as trying to compete for who can provide the most wrong answer for "2+2="
- magarnicle 5mo agoIt's a linguistics thing, it's about word usage more than about colour. You ask someone to get a book off the shelf, and you say "get the blue book" and the person is confused because they see a green book. We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
- xatax 5mo agoI think the "numeric" equivalent to this would be "is this a few/many?" And you would get some number arguing how "several" is a distinct category in the same way this post has people talking about cyan.
- D-Machine 5mo agoWrong way to do it. We know from psychometrics that forced binaries like this just create junk (people disagree with the question, so just choose a forced answer based on some heuristic for each such question like "closest to my mouse / finger" or "most socially desirable" or "same as last time"). So you aren't measuring what you think when you force choice like this. 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.
- 5mo ago
- matt_kantor 5mo agoI interpreted the buttons to mean "this is bluer than it is green" and "this is greener than it is blue".
- dropofwill 5mo agoIn linguistics this sort of thinking comes from 'basic color term' theory, which lays out heuristics for deciding if a word for a color in a given language is 'basic'. 2 things going against these blue-green terms are: * 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).