Is my blue your blue? (2024) • Hacker News Board

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#241

Post by diwank » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:10 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #238

scoofy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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…

Philosophically 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?

this is actually a surprisingly rich area of debate in philosophy of mind. see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#242

Post by diwank » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:11 AM UTC

red75prime wrote: post #237

MichaelDickens wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logically I understand that cyan is directly between green and blue, but my brain believes it's 100% blue.

BTW, cyan is very poorly represented by sRGB color space. I was delighted to see the real vibrant cyan of the Mediterranean sea.

and device dependent. this is a very tricky thing to get rendered consistently

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#243

Post by ajkjk » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:14 AM UTC

reactordev wrote: post #190

ajkjk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There'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.

Incorrect, it either lies on the blue side or the green side, you must choose. Neither is not an option.

I chose to close the tab.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#244

Post by argee » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:16 AM UTC

red75prime wrote: post #237

MichaelDickens wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logically I understand that cyan is directly between green and blue, but my brain believes it's 100% blue.

BTW, cyan is very poorly represented by sRGB color space. I was delighted to see the real vibrant cyan of the Mediterranean sea.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#245

Post by notatoad » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:17 AM UTC

I did it twice. The first time, I was bluer than 57% the second time I was greener than 63%.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#246

Post by merge_software » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:18 AM UTC

This is really great. Love the chart at the end. Apparently I evaluate heavily toward thinking green is blue.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#247

Post by hellojimbo » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:19 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #238

scoofy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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…

Philosophically 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?

For 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

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#248

Post by martheen » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:22 AM UTC

javawizard wrote: post #178

ZeWaka wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

grue

It's better than bleen I suppose. Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen ; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen . I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one…

Not a native speaker, bleen for me got auto corrected by my brain to green. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, but I'd prefer grue because my brain will immediately understand we're talking about the umbrella term. If grue is said out of context, I'd imagine Gru from despicable me, when written I'd imagine gruel, but, again, because I'm not a native speaker, instead of yucky food I'd instead think about that episode of Masha and the Bear where they end up with a houseful of the porridge.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#249

Post by ecshafer » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:25 AM UTC

sudobash1 wrote: post #179

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 sin…

My 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.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#250

Post by mncharity » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 2:31 AM UTC

The xkcd color survey[1] was 16 years ago now. With the data available, there were various follow-ups. Many, including xkcd's own "take it for fun here" link there in [1], are now 404. But the strata[2] and word cloud[3] are still up, and relevant here.

The data remains available. It was a TidyTuesday ("social data project") for 2025-07-08.[4] This response[5] looked at TFA. (This week's TT is ag tariffs.[9])

I just did a quick and sloppy search, so there's likely more out there. Curiously, I found AIMode and Bing/chat less immediately helpful than I'd have guessed.

Years ago I used the xkcd data for a prototype web interactive for kids, which shader filtered video to selected colors... but it was overlapping rather than a partition, and I'd never leave out cyan. Hmm, maybe a vibe coding target.

[1] https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ [2] https://www.datapointed.net/2010/06/xkcd-color-name-strata/ [3] https://luminoso.com/the-color-cloud-an-interactive-visualiz... [4] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat... [5] https://jofrhwld.github.io/blog/posts/2025/07/2025-07-09_col... Off topic: [9] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat...