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Is my blue your blue? (2024)

ismy.blue

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Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#461

Post by vigilantpuma »

something765478 wrote: post #427
vigilantpuma wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 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 )). 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…

I'm a Russian speaker, but I've never thought of goluboy and siniy as separate colors, unlike blue and green. To me, goluboy and siniy are like pink and red; just different shades of the same color.

Pink and red are also separate basic color terms in English!

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#462

Post by vigilantpuma »

mathw wrote: post #389
vigilantpuma wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 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 )). 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…

And this changes over time, because for me cyan IS a basic colour term and I'm a native English speaker.

With all due respect, you're one individual and basic color terms for a language are not determined by a single individual. If you look at usage via proxies like Google ngrams[1] or Google trends[2], cyan barely registers, which suggests it hasn't really shifted to a basic color term.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=black%2Cwhite%...

[2] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Red%2Cgreen%2Cyellow%2Cb...

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#463

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

gora_mohanty wrote: post #419
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the same g-protein coupled b If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?

> If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware? That path leads down to solipsism which is not very intersting

I was talking about something a little more empirical. Like, literally, does my g-protein consist of exactly the same amino acids chained together in the same sequence, and folded identically? Some minor mutations don't always make the protein non-functional, not all would result in color-blindness. I thought this was the basis for tetrachromats anyway, just with a different protein (and a more significant mutation).

Same with "firmware". If our brains process the data differently, then our actual perception might vary in (eventually, I would hope) real-world measurable ways.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#464

Post by thaumasiotes »

ralferoo wrote: post #360
Suppafly wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 the…

The latter tests were all a bit pointless because they were just turquoise, and all looked much the same - a mix of blue and green, so I was pretty much answering based on whether it was bluer or greener than the previous image. The results said "Your boundary is at hue 179, bluer than 82% of the population. For you, turquoise is green." and definitely if I was judging the boundary on a gradient, I'd have placed the…

Yes, the structure of the test is designed to produce a fake result based on a spurious premise.

It wants to do a binary search in the color space to find "The Boundary" between your personal concept of green and your personal concept of blue.

No such boundary exists. If you abandon the idea of binary search and just present a bunch of similar colors in no particular order, you'll get more realistic results, which look like "you called color x 'blue' x% of the time, and 'green' (1-x)% of the time". You could even display a grayscale histogram of the blue-green continuum according to the odds of any particular point on it being labeled "blue" or "green". That would be fun.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#465

Post by strogonoff »

michaelmior wrote: post #132
WesleyJohnson wrote: post #129

I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been calle…

The scenario you're describing seems like more of a language thing than a perception thing. We generally learn names of colors by references to common objects. I would argue that if people agree something is "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple" then it doesn't really matter what you're seeing, that color is red.

Our experience doesn’t become unimportant just because it’s lost in translation. It’s a paradox that we can’t know what X feels like to another person because communication is very lossy, but that does not warrant dismissal. We are not p-zombies, we do feel things.

In fact, the argument that “what we experience doesn’t matter” looks incongruous insofar as it is made by an entity experiencing something and in fact because said entity is experiencing something—the entity has no access to anything but experience.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#466

Post by croisillon »

red369 wrote: post #314
croisillon wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

let's be honest, orange is really a burnt yellow

Orange 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?

i agree with bright brown!

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#467

Post by Grimblewald »

martin- wrote: post #439
Grimblewald wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, this seemed silly. It seems to be more a question of "would you say turquise is blue or green?" Rather than a question of our blues match. Better imo would be to ask something like paired colours and pick the "more blue" one. Cool idea for a website, but imo poorly formulated.

But if cyan for me is blue, and for you it's green, or neither (though that option is not available in this test), then that DOES tell us if our definitions of the word "blue" match. For me, the concept "blue" covers the cyan part of the spectrum, while for others it clearly doesn't.

A neither option would also work. Point is half the colours i was shown fall into neither

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#469

Post by freehorse »

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?

There is a cognitive science research group in japan that looks into this kind of problems [0]. They made a similarity judgement task, and construct embendings using it, which is basically a similarity structure in some vector space.

[0] Is my "red" your "red"?: Evaluating structural correspondences between color similarity judgments using unsupervised alignment https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40124475/

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#470

Post by djaro »

vigilantpuma wrote: post #462
mathw wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this changes over time, because for me cyan IS a basic colour term and I'm a native English speaker.

With all due respect, you're one individual and basic color terms for a language are not determined by a single individual. If you look at usage via proxies like Google ngrams[1] or Google trends[2], cyan barely registers, which suggests it hasn't really shifted to a basic color term. [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=black%2Cwhite%... [2] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=Red%2Cgreen%2Cyellow%2Cb..…

But its frequency still rose by over 300x since the start of the chart, which might suggest that for some people it is a basic color term.

"English" isn't one monolith. Every English speaker speaks their own version, some closer to each other than others, and new features are constantly being added or removed.

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