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As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, t
by sudobash1 5mo ago
As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.
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.
- irishcoffee 5mo agoTaught by whom? I hear parents are wonderful teachers. Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.
- MichaelDickens 5mo agoLogically I understand that cyan is directly between green and blue, but my brain believes it's 100% blue.
- red75prime 5mo agoBTW, cyan is very poorly represented by sRGB color space. I was delighted to see the real vibrant cyan of the Mediterranean sea.
- diwank 5mo agoand device dependent. this is a very tricky thing to get rendered consistently
- argee 5mo agoYou might like this then. [0] [0] https://dynomight.net/colors/#2 https://dynomight.net/colors/#2
- orthoxerox 5mo agoIt's always great to experience completely new qualia.
- sebastiennight 5mo agoThat went from a fun, interesting experience, to wondering if this is how SCP 3125 was going to get me, as the entire screen seemed to become a wild glowing green long after the animation likely ended. వ
- Insanity 5mo agoSame for me, I classify it as blue.
- gcanyon 5mo agofunny thing is that I would have said cyan was blue going into this, but the outcome had me classifying the boundary at "more blue than 93% of the population" -- meaning that I classed cyan as green when asked, without even remotely questioning it.
- coffeeling 5mo agoCyan isn't between green and blue, at least not completely. If you take green and blue, you won't be able to represent a good chunk of cyan hues. It feels greenish and blueish, but is neither, and is broader than any combination of the two, which is partly why some bright cyan objects (like the bird eggs on Wikipedia) look kind of unnaturally intense. Those eggs are a bright, slightly blue-leaning cyan.
- seba_dos1 5mo agoYes, for me cyan is firmly a shade of blue, and turquoise is a blue color that's somewhat greenish.
- scoofy 5mo agoI was having a discussion closely related to this recently because of my background in philosophy of language. Languages are functional, but not rigid. The rules and referents of "blue" become kind of pointless around the edges, and narrow words like cyan or turquoise -- even words borrowed from other languages -- are more functional. This is exaggerated further when the functionality becomes very important, which is where technical jargon starts to come into play. Languages should useful to the speaker; they do not define the constraints of the speaker. "Blue" is useful for the average English speaker, but completely useless for a graphic designer.
- echelon 5mo agoPhilosophically speaking, does each of us experience "520 nm green" the same way? 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?
- scoofy 5mo agoConsciousness and qualia are a mystery. I would assume we don’t, simply because nerves are reproduced biologically, but I’m not a neuroscientist.
- diwank 5mo agothis is actually a surprisingly rich area of debate in philosophy of mind. see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/
- hellojimbo 5mo agoFor different brains, the answer has to be no because the images you see are a "neural net" construction and if that neural net differs then the "image" you see is different
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago>the same g-protein coupled b If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?
- crazygringo 5mo agoCame here to say the same thing. 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.
- s0rce 5mo agoThis was exactly my issue. There was no perception issue I could clearly identify the intermediate color as neither truly blue or green.
- driverdan 5mo agoNot only that but once you pick green or blue it's going to skew your results in that direction. I got a higher level of blue as my result but it's only because that's what I picked since I had to pick one of them.
- olpad 5mo agoRed vs orange vs yellow is not the same as green vs cyan vs blue though. Red and orange and yellow are the same distance on the color wheel as green and blue and purple, so you could do this same thing with red/red-orange/orange or the orange to yellow spectrum exclusively.
- ImprovedSilence 5mo agoI mean, that's the whole point of this exercise. In reality there is no hard line between green and blue, and if you make someone pick, their line is going to be entirely subjective, and different than others.
- somenameforme 5mo agoThat's like saying there's no hard line between e.g. white and gray, or even white and black if we take it to an extreme. And that is accurate, if you slowly shift between the two then people will claim a transition at slightly different points, but it's entirely meaningless because it's (getting back to the blue/green example) not like anybody is going to insist 'no that's blue!' or 'no that's green!' It's obvious that it's intentionally ambiguous and so any pick at such a point is going to be largely arbitrary with little attachment held by anybody. [1] - https://colordesigner.io/color-mixer https://colordesigner.io/color-mixer
- vigilantpuma 5mo agoActually people will definitely insist on "no that's blue" or "no that's green." My husband and I have frequent disagreements about a specific shade of blue/green. I think it's blue. He thinks it's green.
- stainablesteel 5mo agoit's either blue, or it's green. pick a side, coward
- moate 5mo agoAmbiguity scaring the shit out of engineers is giving me life on this blah of a Monday.
- tshaddox 5mo agoI’m aware of cyan, of course, but it never occurred to me while doing this quiz, because the point was clearly to choose between blue and green. Of course there’s cyan, turquoise, teal, sky blue, etc., but the point is to make the potentially difficult choice between only blue and green. 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.
- ecshafer 5mo agoMy daughter was watching Blue's Clues. They were doing color combinations (red + blue = purple, yellow + blue = green, etc). They then also did a further step, blue + green = cyan, and did green + yellow = chartreuse. Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.
- gdwatson 5mo ago> Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct. You need to get into either fishing (chartreuse lures are common) or cocktails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) .
- coffeeling 5mo agoThe funny part about color spaces being that you can't make (pure) cyan out of green and blue, which is exactly why CMYK is used over RYB in inks. (I mostly think about colours in Hue-Saturation-Value terms, and a hue wheel of blue-cyan-green-yellow-orange-red-purple)
- noahchen 5mo agoFor subtractive colors (dyes) you're right. For additive (light), green and blue make cyan (Hex: #00FFFF)
- Suppafly 5mo agoI only know chartreuse from fishing lures.
- refactor_master 5mo agoI only know chartreuse from the liquor. I thought it was green though.
- tmtvl 5mo ago
- moate 5mo agoIt's almost like color is a spectrum of light and we just arbitrarily slice it and decide "this has a name" because we are finite being who demand order from things that are not ordered and then demand further order from that order and get REALLY mad.
- Suppafly 5mo ago>As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow. 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.
- D-Machine 5mo agoYes, very annoying, we know from extensive work in psychometrics that single-item, binary / forced-choice items produce junk responses that are heavily contaminated with response styles (answer in most socially-desirable way, select closest response to mouse/finger, select same response as last time, select random response, etc). Just give people an out ("Diagree with the question / premises", "Prefer not to answer", "Unsure / Can't decide", etc) and make sure you have e.g. a 5-7 point Likert-type scale for multiple items, or up to an 11-point scale for single items. 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).
- guidopallemans 5mo ago> most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
- Suppafly 5mo ago>For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all! 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.
- 5mo ago
- harrall 5mo agoPeople are freaking out about this test like it’s some judgement of their character or something. I just picked “green” or “blue” without thinking. 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 https://www.xrite.com/hue-test That’s way more interesting.
- throwup238 5mo ago> 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. 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
- dotancohen 5mo agoI'd love to see a photograph of a 32 bit greyscale gradient on both. I wonder if some monitors with similar issues would not be able to represent the photograph properly.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dotancohen 5mo agoBy what method would you suggest calibrating one's monitor? I use Debian Linux if that's a factor.
- harrall 5mo ago
- croisillon 5mo agolet's be honest, orange is really a burnt yellow
- red369 5mo agoOrange is bright brown! 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?
- croisillon 5mo agoi agree with bright brown!
- wodenokoto 5mo agoThe whole point is to measure where you draw the line between blue and green, which is going to be in turquoise territory. When you finish the test it even tells you if you consider turquoise blue or green.
- D-Machine 5mo agoExcept you can reject the very (stupid) question / framing, in which case, the response is to either close the tab, or respond in a particular response style, neither of which makes the data more informative. This kind of clumsy stuff is just dumb with what we know now, edutainment distraction for the HN crowd.
- koliber 5mo agoThere was a time when there were no separate names for blue and green in the Japanese language. Some languages right now have concepts of fundamental colors like navy blue and light blue, where English rolls it into a single "blue". Naming colors is highly cultural and changes over time. The idea that colors have boundaries is fascinating from both psychological as well as linguistic perspectives. 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.
- RobotToaster 5mo agoIt does seem like more of a test of if you consider turquoise to be "a green" or "a blue"
- vigilantpuma 5mo agoThis test is really using how English organizes color. In English, blue and green are basic color terms ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms)). You're right that we would have trouble with an orange screen if we were asked to call it red or yellow, but that's because orange is also a basic color term in English. 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.
- kogold 5mo agoThanks, this seemed obvious to me too. But I would add, this could apply to orange too - there are a lot of orange tones between yellow and red, and if you likewise wanted to determine your subjective boundary, which this is only about, you would be able to say "rather red for me" or "rather yellow for me", regardless of the intermediate color. Since the space of colors can be described as convex, so to speak, you can between every two arbitrary colors determine your subjective decision boundary, regardless of any color in between. The premise is just accepting to ignore those colors.
- jounker 5mo agoThe person you were responding to said that cyan feels like a completely different color to them, neither green nor blue. I had the same reaction when it gave me a color that I immediately identified as teal, and I learned my colors as a monolingual english speaker in Ohio. Therefore the supposition that all English speakers see only blue or green is an oversimplification.
- vigilantpuma 5mo ago
- Lerc 5mo agoIt's a false dichrotamy.
- Abimelex 5mo agoThere are no "cyan-receptors" on your retina so it's not a cultural thing, it's a bio-physics one. Plus as many mentioned the calibration of you display has propably a way higher impact on this than anything else. So don't be upset, it's just for fun :)
- adrian_b 5mo agoWhile "orange" did not exist as a single word in most languages, already in Old English or even in Latin or Ancient Greek one could find mentions about things that were "red-yellow". 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.
- carlosjobim 5mo ago> 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". Isn't this how things are still today? For example "orange".
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cestith 5mo agoApparently the color name did come from the fruit, and therefore didn’t enter common use in English until around the 16th century.
- thaumasiotes 5mo ago> Isn't this how things are still today? For example "orange". 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/raudaz https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic... [only meaning: "red"], but note that this is normal.
- adrian_b 5mo agoThe current use of "cyan" for blue-green is a modern confusion caused by people who have used Greek words without bothering to check their true meaning. 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).
- adrian_b 5mo agoSomeone has downvoted this, despite the fact that what I have written is not an opinion, but just facts. 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).
- watwut 5mo agoIt is not an incorrect meaning, it is that meaning of the word in English is different. What it meant in ancient Greek or in 1805 is not relevant to what it means today. Words meanings shift over time in all languages. And when languages take sounds from other languages, they also regularly shift their meanings.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- frisia 5mo agothe question is if you think this shade of cyan is more green than blue
- sureMan6 5mo agoThat's very funny to have my exact reaction present in the first comment, I was thinking "that's turquoise" but I do also feel like turquoise is green, like you'd call the Copenhagen copper domes green, and the word verdigris comes from green
- biztos 5mo agoI have no idea when the words entered the languages, but I find it quite interesting that the color Orange in Thai is literally the color of the fruit (สีส้ม) whereas in Hungarian it is the same fruit as a shade of yellow (narancssárga).
- sayYayToLife 5mo ago[dead]
- Melatonic 5mo agoPink isn't real
- carlosjobim 5mo ago> As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool. 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.
- FrustratedMonky 5mo agoThis is the point, isn't it? Why does 'turquoise' or 'orange' being labeled as a distinct colors, mean that they are not on the scale between two other colors?
- pharrington 5mo agoThis makes me realize that one of my formative childhood experiences was seeing the Crayola 64 crayon pack and thinking "huh, I guess there is NO limit."
- wwn_se 5mo agoorange is a subset of brown.
- saghm 5mo agoI had a similar reaction at first, but I also realized that the point isn't to literally say "if someone asked what color this was, I would say blue or green" but "do I consider this 'more blue than green' or 'more green than blue'". With the idea of color as a spectrum rather than a discrete set of values, it's reasonable to ask whether a given shade falls closer what you'd consider one value or another. Even though I don't consider cyan to "be" blue, I do consider it closer to blue than green, in the same way that I consider magenta to be closer to red than blue. This is entirely subjective though, and at least personally I find it fun to see the variety of perceptions people have!