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Comment by percentcer

14 hours ago

I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.

100%. It's like being asked is this black or white and being shown 50% grey.

  • That’s the point of this. To find out where in that spectrum your vision lands, not to get a perfect score.

    • OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.

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    • But that is wrong. This doesn't test colour perception or vision, it tests verbal classification of colour perception into a forced binary. Everyone could be perceiving the colour qualia 100% identically, but simply choosing different linguistic cutpoints, meaning you can't say this is about vision / perception at all (it may just be about language use).

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  • It’s not really the same, because black and white strongly connote being at the far ends of their continuum (lightness), and are thus opposites, whereas blue and green are more vaguely specified as nearby spots on their continuum (hue).

  • Yeah, but is the gray to you more look more black or more white? That's the point.

    • It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.

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

  • That is the point of the exercise though. Is 50% really where you draw the line?

    • But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.

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I totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.

  • I closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.

Thats the exact point of this experiment to define the inbetween and move it to either green or blue.

:/

  • Wrong way to do it. We know from psychometrics that forced binaries like this just create junk (people disagree with the question, so just choose a forced answer based on some heuristic for each such question like "closest to my mouse / finger" or "most socially desirable" or "same as last time"). So you aren't measuring what you think when you force choice like this.

    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.

    • Is it really junk though? There are several comments in this thread like “people tell me I call stuff blue that they think is green and this quiz confirms that.”

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  • That makes about as much sense as trying to compete for who can provide the most wrong answer for "2+2="

    • It's a linguistics thing, it's about word usage more than about colour. You ask someone to get a book off the shelf, and you say "get the blue book" and the person is confused because they see a green book.

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

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I interpreted the buttons to mean "this is bluer than it is green" and "this is greener than it is blue".

In linguistics this sort of thinking comes from 'basic color term' theory, which lays out heuristics for deciding if a word for a color in a given language is 'basic'. 2 things going against these blue-green terms are:

* 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).