Is my blue your blue? (2024)

If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.

    Blue his house
    With a blue little window
    And a blue Corvette
    And everything is blue for him
    And himself and everybody around
    'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen (to listen)

For this, you just lost The Game.

https://xkcd.com/391/

My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.

Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)

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 word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?

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).

I’m sure you’ve had conversations where that’s the answer you want to give.

A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.

Realistically there is a broad range that we all can acknowledge is neither, but is instead teal, and forcing a binary choice means people just choose randomly.

I think the test can be fairly criticised on the basis that it is assuming everyone's psychological colour space has a discrete boundary between blue and green, which clearly isn't the case for some people (like you), but it is for others (like me).

Once I figured it, I tried it 2 more times ... and got different results :) but the new results were consistent.

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...

Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.

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...

Russian speakers broadly consider sky blue / turquoise / cyan a distinct color right between green and blue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

Although the question "is the color distinct and basic or just a shade?" is very subjective. Is pink distinct or a shade of red/purple? Is purple distinct or a shade of red/blue? Is green distinct or a shade of blue? (it's well-known that in Japanese green separated from blue only relatively recently, with very bluish traffic lights and other quirks included)

I think there's another set of questions here -- why is "blue-green family" a thing in your mind, rather than "blue-yellow family"? Is there a "red-blue family"? "Orange-blue"?

Also, yellow-blue and red-green are opponents that can't be mixed because of how our retinas preprocess the signals from cones. Therefore, you obviously end up with blue-green (cyan), red-yellow (orange), yellow-green (lime) and blue-red (magenta, which actually doesn't exist on the light spectrum) families of related colors.

The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.

:/

We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.

And you would get some number arguing how "several" is a distinct category in the same way this post has people talking about cyan.

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.

IMO, growing up, unless you lived under a rock, it seems obvious to me that you will have experienced different people pointing at the same colour and uttering very different colour labels (pink vs. red, blue vs. green, black vs. deep blue/purple, etc) from the labels you might have applied yourself. Differing/shared colour perception isn't exactly a rare kind of topic (almost is like the canonical stoner topic, also common online), so I'd be a bit surprised if this demo is actually introducing anyone to this concept already. Any excitement is surely from other implications people think the demo has.

But unfortunately there are no interesting implications from what this site shows. Yes, it demonstrates the boring fact that: "it isn't clear how different people assign different color labels to the same physical stimuli" (and yes, this is FALSELY assuming that everyone's monitors/screens are the same too), but if you didn't already know this... I'm not sure exactly what social context you could have possibly grown up in.

* 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).

Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?