[fogleman]

I think this is flawed. You quickly end up on a color that's clearly not "blue" or "green" and you're unlikely to keep hitting "this is green" several times in a row, conceding that ok, fine, maybe this is blue, whatever. You're basically measuring how many times people are willing to click the same button in a row.

Edit: Possible improvements: changing the wording to "this is MORE green" and "this is MORE blue" and randomizing the order in which they are shown, somehow. I realize you're just doing some kind of binary search, narrowing the color range.

This is not to mention color calibration of your monitor, or your eyes adjusting / fatiguing to the bold color over time...

[pminimax]

The order is randomized. Hit reset and you'll get a different sequence. The sequence is also adaptive (not a binary search---it's hitting specific points of the tail of a sigmoid in a logistic regression it's building as you go along). Try it a few times and you'll see how reproducible it is for you.

It of course depends on the calibration of your monitor. One of the reasons I did this project is I wanted to see if there were systematic differences in color names and balance in the wild, for example, by device type (desktop vs. Android vs. iPhone), time of day (night mode), country (Sapir-Whorf), etc.

[lifthrasiir]

The sequence itself should be converging however, right? I feel that there should be some random jumps outside of the current confidence interval so that contextual aspects can be filtered out or at least recognized.

[isoprophlex]

Yes, exactly this. Because it seems to be converging right now, I quickly get the feeling that there's no meaningful choice, after the first three prompts you end up with something that's neither green nor blue. Re-taking the test gave me a very different score.

It might work better for me to do some contrastive questioning: show a definite green followed by an intermediary color, then a definite blue followed by an intermediate color.

[wodenokoto]

The whole point of asserting where your border between green and blue is, is to ask about colors that are in between the two. It doesn't make sense to ask is RGB(0,0,255) blue to you? Well, unless you are color blind it is.

[isoprophlex]

Of course, that's clear as day; the idea is to reset your presumptions from the previous trial and sample the ambiguous colors in a more consistent way, by priming you from the extreme ends of the green/blue scale.

See it as a way to avoid perceptual hysteresis.

[Rastonbury]

These results would be interesting

[yarg]

I'd prefer blue/green/neither.

With the third colour, I just thought "no, that's teal", and my decision was (as you suggested) semi-arbitrary.

[pminimax]

It is common practice in psychometrics to use two levels in a forced choice and model responses as a logistic regression, which is what's done here. Adding an N/A option turns the thing into an ordered logistic regression with unknown levels, which is tricky to fit, but it's possible. Having done a lot of psychophysics, having more options generally doesn't make the task easier.

[bofadeez]

Sounds like psychometrics is unsuitable for modeling this problem, according to what you're saying. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

[zarzavat]

The way that XKCD did it is the best, you ask people to give a name to each color then the responses are entirely natural and unprompted.

I don’t think that forced choice can give accurate results if a substantial number of people perceive green and blue as being non-adjacent - i.e. there exists a color between green and blue (turquoise/cyan/teal).

Otherwise it’s like asking people whether a color is red or yellow, when it’s clearly a shade of orange.

[ljsprague]

Some shades of orange are closer to red and some are closer to yellow.

[zarzavat]

Yes but saying that a shade of orange is closer to yellow is different from saying that it is yellow.

Orange is closer to green than blue but I wouldn’t say that it’s a shade of green. It’s just orange.

[cubefox]

> Otherwise it’s like asking people whether a color is red or yellow, when it’s clearly a shade of orange.

No it's like asking people whether a color is red or green, when it's clearly a shade of yellow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_wheel#/media/File%3ALine...

[EasyMark]

That’s why I took the test 5 times, and my scores varied between 63% and 69% “green” so I took the average at 66.4

[tripzilch]

Are you sure that it is common practice for a problem that has three valid answers A, B and C, to only allow people to answer A or C?

Your website is not talking about "levels" of colour.

It's asking "is this blue or green", not "is this closer to blue or closer to green".

The question (1) "is this blue or green" has three valid answers: blue, green or neither.

The question (2) "is this closer to blue or green" only has two valid answers.

I would assume that with these types of surveys, the first thing to do is to qualify the proper categorization of the question.

Sorry to say, but to me it seems that almost all of the confusion in the discussion here is because you're asking question (1) (which has three valid answers) but expecting an answer from (2) (which indeed has two valid answers).

[adamhartenz]

but is the teal more green or blue. You should be able to answer that

[yarg]

Is zero more positive or negative? You should be able to answer that.

[Feathercrown]

But teal isn't a single point, it's a range. You can have teals that are more blue or more green than each other; they can't all be zero. Whichever one you choose to be the true transition point between blue and green, there will be teals that are more blue or green than that one.

[yarg]

Sure, but there's also a subrange at the (subjective) centre of that range that will not be perceived as either more blue or more green.

And the teal that I referenced in my earlier comment was (for me) such a colour.

[delecti]

Then by that framing, the test is asking you to decide what hue value is the "zero" between the positive/negative blue/green. Is the wording imperfect? Sure, but the intent was still entirely clear.

[nayroclade]

Saying it’s a subrange implies you can perceive differences in tone within it. In which case, reframe the question as “is this shade of teal closer to the blue or green end of the subrange” if you like.

[lifthrasiir]

I think the main point of this test was to determine the position of teal in your case, as your definition of teal is the midpoint(-ish range) between blue and green. (For me it's more blue though.)

[jdiff]

More positive. -0 is more negative.

[yarg]

It's neutral (-1 * 0 ≡ +1 * 0); don't confuse it for an infinitesimal (which can be positive or negative).

[zeven7]

I think they were referring to -0 in floating point, which does exist as a separate value from +0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed_zero

[lll-o-lll]

Nah, zero definitely feels a bit more positive to me.

[mewpmewp2]

True zero is very rare. So you are saying that teal just happens to be the true zero?

[yarg]

No, I'm saying that the sliver of a chasm between the colour in isolate, and what I subconsciously imagine the midpoint to be, is so damned thin that were I to look at the colours side by side, I could not distinguish one from t'other.

And (even if I could) a bluish teal would no more be a blue than a reddish orange a red.

[Narishma]

It's more teal.

[antisthenes]

Nope. On RGB, they are equal parts blue/green.

Since most people are viewing this on a monitor, the question is pointless.

[SamBam]

It's not about how an RGB monitor produces the color, it's about how it's perceived. #00ffff ("Cyan" or "Aqua" [1]) looks bluer to me than green, while #008080 ("Teal") looks significantly greener, despite both colors using equal amounts of blue and green in RGB.

1. https://htmlcolorcodes.com/color-names/

[dyauspitr]

Then everything past the first blue would be neither and you wouldn’t have anything interesting. All those other colors are different shades of teal.

[elcomet]

But this choice has very limited impact; as you are already in a very narrow window of color

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I definitely have the bias you mention. In my case I don't think it's mainly due to not wanting to push the same button many times in a row, but because I compare with the previous color, so if previously I was already somewhat unsure but I chose green and now it became slightly bluer, it "must" be blue, right?

I think I can get over it, but it requires conscious effort and even then, who knows. Bias is often unconscious.

Another possible improvement would be to alternate the binary search colors with some randomly-generated hues. Even if those answers are outright ignored, and the process becomes longer, I think they would help to alleviate that bias. At least you wouldn't be directly comparing to the previous color.

[KaiserPro]

VFX engineer here. Yes we used to cailbrate monitors and work in the dark.

However one of the key people that built our colour pipeline was also colour blind, so its not actually a requirement, so long as you use the right tools.

Most people aren't that sensitive to colour, especially if its out of context. a minority of people aren't that good at relative chromaticity as well (as in is this colour bluer/greener/redder than that one) But a lot of people are.

Language affects how you perceive colour as well.

But to say the experiment is flawed I think misses the nuance, which is capturing how people see colour _in the real world_. Sure some people will have truetone on, or some other daily colour balance fiddling. But thats still how people see the world as it is, rather than in isolation.

[MisterBastahrd]

I once worked for a company that had a designer who was color blind. He would always show up wearing the exact same outfit every day: turns out that he was REALLY color blind, and so he just gave up and bought 7 long sleeved shirts and 7 pants, all black. Didn't work out so well for him in the designs... most companies don't want monochrome websites.

[tptacek]

One issue with it: I did it 3 times and got 3 very different results.

[Retr0id]

Likewise. I think for me there's quite a wide band of colours in the middle that I consider to be "neither/either", so I'm basically just picking a random answer for those.

A modified version of the test that finds two boundaries (green/neither/blue) could be interesting.

Or maybe it just needs to take more samples, in a more random order.

[wzdd]

Same. Some of them are neither obviously blue nor obviously green, so what the test was measuring for me was what I was thinking about at the time, the decision I'd previously made, whether my mouse was currently hovering over "blue" or "green", etc.

[fsckboy]

>I think this is flawed. You quickly end up on a color that's clearly not "blue" or "green" and you're unlikely to keep hitting "this is green" several times in a row, conceding that ok, fine, maybe this is blue, whatever.

I agree with you, the whole thing is flawed when it could be better. When you ask the question "is my blue your blue?", you are evoking the old philosophical question, and it's a question about color perception, not words. This test did not test color perception, it tested "what word do you use?"

I think of blue as a pure color, and green as a wide range of colors all the way to yellow, to me another pure color. so if there's any green at all in it, I'm going to call it green. (maybe it's left over from kindergarten blending "primary colors". also, while I like green grass, I don't like green as a color, so any green I see is a likely to make me think, ew, green) But in terms of what I see, I can only assume I'm seeing the same thing as everybody else is because the test is not testing it. Just because I call something green doesn't mean I don't see all the blue in it.

>Edit: Possible improvements: changing the wording to "this is MORE green" and "this is MORE blue" and randomizing the order in which they are shown, somehow. I realize you're just doing some kind of binary search, narrowing the color range.

yes, the test should show you pure blue, then a turquoise mix, then pure green, and a ... etc. It should also retest you on things you already answered to measure where you are consistent.

[yarg]

I do think that the philosophical question could potentially be approachable in a modern context;

Show people a colour and map their brain activity - the level of similarity between two people's colour perceptions should be reflected by similarities in the activity.

[pminimax]

People have done this. See, e.g. Brouwer and Heeger (2009), Decoding and Reconstructing Color from Responses in Human Visual Cortex.

[yarg]

Thanks.

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/29/44/13992.full.pd...

[lazide]

Why do you think that would be the case?

One persons ‘blue’ activity could be different than another’s while still being the same wavelength of light and general perception.

[yarg]

The philosophical question is not dealing with the objective external reality;

It's a question of subjective experience - and that experience should be reflected in electrical activity.

Given the fact that the broad structure of the brain is largely shared across members of the species, similar stimulation should trigger similar activity in the same regions of the brain.

If the same colour triggers markedly different activities, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that the subjective experiences are not the same.

[lazide]

Except that’s literally not how humans are wired or develop - even nerve paths and other fine grained details in our bodies show significant divergence, and there are major macro level differences readily apparent even based on gender, color blindness, etc.

Honestly, it would be shocking if it were even a little true beyond ‘frontal cortex’ levels of granularity. And even then, Phineas Gage type situations make it clear that may not actually be required either.

And that means completely different individual activity can trigger similar subjective experiences as much as similar activity can trigger different subjective experiences, no?

[yarg]

If that were the case then there's no way that they'd be able to extract images from people's neural activity, and yet they've started doing that very thing.

[amenhotep]

It sounds like you're in possession of a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, you should alert your nearest philosophy department.

[yarg]

No real need for the snark; if we dismiss the notion of human divinity and look at ourselves as broadly fixed macro-structure computational machines (like any other broadly deterministic machine) similar signals propagating over the same sets of sub-computers will generally (accepting the undetectable, such as steganographically hidden homomorphic compute contexts) be reflective of similar underlying operations.

If I were to imagine a warrior, and his general perception of the colour red, I may find the way his brain processes the colour more closely to a rival warrior than his wife the gardener.

A real world example; London taxi drivers and bus drivers show distinct patterns of changes to the hippocampus.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17024677/

The way that the mapping data is stored will be heavily bias towards being spatially reflective of the real world counterpart.

Note the bias will be towards a degree structural isomorphism, one internal 2D + 1T spatiotemporal surface map of the city might be a rotation and/or reprioritisation of another - but they will have a shared basis (convergent compute simulations of biased subsets of the same real world structures), and when navigating from point A to point B, the path and nature(though not the propagation vector) of the electrical activity of both will be reflection of the same real-world surface map.

Now I say spatiotemporal - because the driver going from A to B in the morning will develop different expectations of the levels of traffic at different parts of the journey.

[yread]

Agreed. It would be more accurate to show the final gradient (without the curve) and let people choose where is the boundary. It wasn't even clear what the actual task is

[adamhartenz]

Yup, but at that level, you are not affecting the results very much. So it all works out

[larschdk]

I am unable to answer many of them. I see mostly turquoise, not blue or green.

[terryf]

> and you're unlikely to keep hitting "this is green" several times in a row

I did. Because it was green!

[arendtio]

Yeah, it felt like a trick question to me.

Because the second color I saw was somewhat like turquoise and the site is called 'Is My Blue Your Blue,' I decided that everything that you say yes to colors would be blue and everything else would be green. I never saw a green until the result was displayed :D

[jsharpe]

Exactly my thoughts! Thanks for putting it so clearly.