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Is my blue your blue? (2024)

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Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#471

Post by djaro »

freehorse wrote: post #469
echelon wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

This still can't show that my red is your red, only that my red is on the same position of my color wheel as your red is on yours

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#473

Post by TZubiri »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #372
TZubiri wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But turquoise can be a blue, just because we have a specific word, doesn't mean more general words are invalieated or made as specific. For example, things can be small or big, a mouse is small, if you refine the vocabulary to include 10 size words, and the mouse is now minuscule, it is still small.

For many people this is like saying 'for you red is blue'.

But in terms of the physical properties of color, namely wavelength of the photon waves, red is diametrically the opposite of blue, they are literally the most different colors. While turqouise and blue have quite adjacent centers and wider definitions.

I get that our subjective definitions can be different, but in this case the subjective differences suggest a difference in objective understanding of color (and countries apparently.)

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#474

Post by vigilantpuma »

djaro wrote: post #470
vigilantpuma wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The further you have to narrow down the set of speakers for whom it's a basic color term, the less of a basic color term it is for English as a whole. We don't have to have this argument about e.g. orange.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#475

Post by nomel »

nomel wrote: post #134
gkhartman wrote: post #20

How much does display calibration factor into this? I'm fairly confident it must impact the results, but unsure how much error it would introduce.

Ambient light color would play a bigger part, with modern displays being fairly good.

Related, here's a nice collection of measurements: https://www.displaymate.com/mobile.html

The last few generations of most everything have been rated "Visually Indistinguishable From Perfect", so it seems they don't test as much anymore.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#476

Post by azepoi »

This is largely cultural and language sensitive. I took the test as a french native speaker and got a green-blue boundary greener than the average population with the commentary "For you, turquoise is blue". Indeed it is. It is called bleu turquoise in french.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#477

Post by BlackFly »

reactordev wrote: post #446
BlackFly wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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…

Conjecture 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.

I 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.

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#479

Post by Multipassionate »

efilife wrote: post #478
Multipassionate wrote: post #472

Damn, I didn't think about that :D Is color perception subjective? How do you measure that? Now it's driving me crazy

It is, more than you think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

Thanks! I also read a bit about this yesterday

Re: Is my blue your blue? (2024)

#480

Post by michaelmior »

strogonoff wrote: post #465
michaelmior wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bec…

I'm not saying our experience is unimportant. I'm talking about how we communicate what colors are. I'm not an expert by any means, but it seems like the way we communicate a shared understanding of what colors are is based on observing things that are the same color. I just don't think we have a way of communicating our subjective view of what a color looks like without reference to some other color.
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