Is my blue your blue?

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ttheogravity about 5 hours ago 220 commentsRead Article on ismy.blue

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sudobash1•about 2 hours ago

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.

I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.

I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.

As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.

scoofy•about 1 hour ago

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 where technical jargon starts to come into play. Languages should useful to the speaker; they do not define the constraints of the speaker. "Blue" is useful for the average English speaker, but completely useless for a graphic designer.

MichaelDickens•about 2 hours ago

Logically I understand that cyan is directly between green and blue, but my brain believes it's 100% blue.

gcanyon•43 minutes ago

funny thing is that I would have said cyan was blue going into this, but the outcome had me classifying the boundary at "more blue than 93% of the population" -- meaning that I classed cyan as green when asked, without even remotely questioning it.

Insanity•about 1 hour ago

Same for me, I classify it as blue.

stainablesteel•6 minutes ago

it's either blue, or it's green. pick a side, coward

driverdan•about 1 hour ago

Not only that but once you pick green or blue it's going to skew your results in that direction. I got a higher level of blue as my result but it's only because that's what I picked since I had to pick one of them.

ImprovedSilence•35 minutes ago

I mean, that's the whole point of this exercise. In reality there is no hard line between green and blue, and if you make someone pick, their line is going to be entirely subjective, and different than others.

crazygringo•about 1 hour ago

Came here to say the same thing.

Like, I'd be interested to see if where my boundaries between blue and cyan, or cyan and green, are compared to the rest of the population.

But there's a whole other color between blue and green! A color that is primary under the subtractive CMYK model.

And it's an even bigger difference than with orange, because while red and yellow are 60° apart on the color wheel so that orange is 30° from each, blue and green are a full 120° apart on the color wheel, with cyan being 60° from each. So it's actually even worse -- it's as bad/nonsensical as showing yellow and asking if yellow is red or green.

s0rce•about 1 hour ago

This was exactly my issue. There was no perception issue I could clearly identify the intermediate color as neither truly blue or green.

irishcoffee•about 2 hours ago

Taught by whom? I hear parents are wonderful teachers.

Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.

smokedetector1•about 4 hours ago

The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!

raddan•4 minutes ago

That’s amusing because I am the converse: my boundary is bluer than 98% of the population. To a first approximation, blue is a very specific thing and all the other colors appear strongly non-blue to me. I do wonder where this preference came from, but it explains all the puzzling interactions between my wife and I over the years.

armada651•about 2 hours ago

Many languages considered green and blue so closely related that they grouped them together under a single term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

ZeWaka•about 2 hours ago

grue

javawizard•about 2 hours ago

It's better than bleen I suppose.

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?

makr17•about 4 hours ago

In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."

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

a_shoeboy•about 3 hours ago

I have had similar conversations with my wife a few times, but I'm the one with working color vision.

miriam_catira•about 3 hours ago

...I get different numbers depending on which eye I use, but both are fairly center. I didn't expect blue-green to be affected though! My left eye can't see certain shades of red as well as my right eye. Bright sunlight makes it more noticeable, but my own skin looks weirdly (sickly) yellowish with one eye and normal with the other.

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. ;)

pleurotus•about 3 hours ago

...I never found another person with the same experience. Here we are. For me though, it's not that sunlight makes it more noticeable, it's that I will see the same shades until I've had too much sunlight—eventually my left eye gets tired, I guess, and sees a lot less red than my right eye. After sleeping it resets and I see the same shade in both eyes. Maybe i should talk to a researcher about this..

rubslopes•about 2 hours ago

90% here, and it makes sense. I'm very picky about saying something is blue!

VadimPR•about 4 hours ago

I had the same discussion with the color of a river in Albania with my wife. The test says my boundary is a bluer than 85% of the pop - sounds about right!

bitexploder•about 4 hours ago

I am bluer than 78%. Colors. How do they work.

itishappy•about 3 hours ago

    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)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BinWA0EenDY

Izmaki•about 2 hours ago

It’s 01:30 in the night you cannot just drop lyrics like that, I’ll have the song stuck in my head for hours.. :(

For this, you just lost The Game.

Sohcahtoa82•about 2 hours ago

Thanks for the earworm.

strangegecko•about 3 hours ago

I'm bluer than 98% apparently. For me, turquoise is green. I didn't realize that's not normal.

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

tetris11•about 3 hours ago

blue than 90%, same verdict with turqouise, though what I call turquoise is bluer than what is shown

gobdovan•about 4 hours ago

You've got the blues.

TZubiri•about 2 hours ago

I have this with a coat, but it's blue vs gray. Would be interesting to generalize this tool not just for other colours, but for other colour properties like saturation not just hue.

rnewme•about 4 hours ago

Same situation happened to me, and I have same test result as you.

kazinator•3 minutes ago

[delayed]

still_grokking•8 minutes ago

This "test" makes no sense. Cyan, and especially turquoise are neither blue nor green, they are a mix (similar to orange between red / yellow).

I had actually a very hard time to answer the questions, needed to overlay most of the color with some mostly white / light gray window and only squint at the color around it to decide. In the end my result was 176, which is almost the exact turning point for most people (and that even while my monitor is set to be more cold than default; but like said I had whatever my monitor shows as "white" to compare; even that "white" is likely technically slightly blue-ish).

Color perception is anyway much more influenced by contrasts then anything else. (Likely similar to acoustic tones, which are very hard to name / locate absolutely than when comparing to some reference tone.)

Besides the things mentioned in the about popup, blue is AFAIK the color we have the most receptors for. So it's imho quite "natural" that most people perceive cyan—which is technically the exact middle—as blue-ish, and of course the color left to it, turquoise, is green-ish (and as it seems, for most people, the mentioned turning point).

percentcer•about 4 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.

SunshineTheCat•about 4 hours ago

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

reactordev•about 4 hours ago

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

xmprt•about 4 hours ago

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.

D-Machine•about 1 hour ago

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).

miltonlost•about 4 hours ago

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

cubefox•about 4 hours ago

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.

MattGaiser•about 4 hours ago

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

mort96•about 4 hours ago

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.

StilesCrisis•about 4 hours ago

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.

ajkjk•about 3 hours ago

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.

jedmeyers•about 4 hours ago

Same here, it's often neither blue nor green, so this experiment is pointless.

AntiUSAbah•about 4 hours ago

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

D-Machine•about 1 hour ago

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.

antisthenes•about 3 hours ago

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

magarnicle•about 1 hour ago

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.

dropofwill•about 2 hours ago

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).

matt_kantor•about 4 hours ago

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

gumby271•about 2 hours ago

"for you, turquoise is blue." Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.

throw0101c•about 2 hours ago

> Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.

For some people "pink" does not exist as a concept, it is "light red". In English we talk about "light blue", but an Italian may talk about azzurro (galazio (γαλάζιο) in Greek; kachol (כחול) in Hebrew). Is azzurro its own colour different from "blue" for everyone, or only for Italians? Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?

Before the different word of "turquoise" was created, did the colour still exist and/or be perceived?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turquoise#Names

If a language/culture does not have a word for "blue" does that mean the colour does not exist?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...

Where does "white" end and "grey" begin? Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_white

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_gray

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_black

Also, a bit of fun with brown:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

D-Machine•about 1 hour ago

Sapir-Worf and its ilk (if we don't have the language/concept, we can't perceive the difference/thing) are widely disproven and debunked, and don't even pass the smell test (learning new concepts and perceiving new things would be impossible). That kind of thinking is so tedious and decades out of date with modern cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, etc.

driverdan•about 1 hour ago

Not everything you listed is the same.

> Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?

No, it's a different word for it.

> Where does "white" end and "grey" begin?

When any amount of black is added to white.

> Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?

When the color is 100% black.

White and black are not the same as red, green, or blue. Tinting or shading a color with white or black does not change the color, it lightens or darkens it. That's not the same for RGB. Combining those results in other colors, regardless if a culture has a specific name for it.

muzani•about 2 hours ago

This is the first time I realized that turquoise is the gray area.

Grimblewald•about 2 hours ago

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.

TZubiri•about 2 hours ago

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.

benleejamin•about 4 hours ago

I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.

(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)

burkaman•about 2 hours ago

I wouldn't assume most people do that. For me the last few looked basically the same so I selected the same color for all of them.

Paracompact•17 minutes ago

You can't assume most people do that, but you also can't assume most people do not do that.

djmips•about 4 hours ago

My boundary was hue 188, bluer than 98% of the population, for me turquoise is green and then it shows an overall chart which I have to agree with so no, I don't agree with your assessment. I often get into blue/green arguments with my children and that's when I started to suspect that it was personal opinion.

muzani•about 2 hours ago

That's if you're matching about 40% of the population.

For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.

layer8•about 4 hours ago

That doesn’t explain why I landed 92% off the population median.

make3•about 4 hours ago

it's a binary search, not too surprising. search over a unidimensional ordered space

hn_throwaway_99•about 2 hours ago

I never understood "forced classification" games like this (as an aside, it's also why I always hated Myers Briggs). Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but it always seems like a dumb, false choice to me.

For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.

nodompa•about 2 hours ago

But what about the definition of aqua outside of any digital color space?

I feel like using only RGB values to define 'aqua' is a bit reductive as it is merely a specification in a specific environment trying to render a type of color but with inherent limitations such as not being able to reproduce the whole spectrum, color accuracy on the display, etc. etc. there's a lot of other parameters along with your own individual color perception that goes beyond "it's equal values blue and green within the RGB color-space"

But then as I list all these things I think I arrive at the same conclusion as you, it feels like a dumb false choice haha

Fernicia•about 1 hour ago

This test finds the midpoints of people's spectrum. They're not asking is "is this completely blue or completely green" but rather "is this more blue or green"

D-Machine•about 1 hour ago

This is the wrong way to do it, psychometrically, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929056. You need to provide people gradations, or you get junk responses / abandonment, and your instrument doesn't measure what you think.

martinky24•about 2 hours ago

It's a fun toy website.

crm9125•about 2 hours ago

It's ok that there are things you don't understand in the world. It's just as valid for them to exist, as it is you are upset about it.

Even if aqua is neither more green or more blue, wouldn't it be interesting if when given the choice, the outcome leans toward green or blue to a statistically significant degree? or perhaps that there are differences in how it's perceived based on measurable factors like geography, wealth, height, weight, etc?

Collecting data is how we learn, and discover new things. Even if it seems dumb to you.

seemaze•about 4 hours ago

This makes no sense. It's like asking:

    "Alice is in Denver. Is Alice in (a) Canada or (b) Mexico?"

    - Your boundary between Canada and Mexico is at 40° latitude, more southern than 53% of the population.

hmokiguess•about 3 hours ago

I recommend this reading: https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...

phaedrus•about 4 hours ago

Someone should make a parody site asking whether shades of yellow are red or violet.

Sohcahtoa82•about 2 hours ago

What if it was phrased differently?

Rather than asking "Is this blue or green?", it's "Does this look more blue to you, or more green to you?"

Because then your analogy becomes "Is Alice closer to Canada or Mexico?"

miltonlost•about 4 hours ago

Your example would only be valid if "blue" and "green" had objective answers for when something is Blue and something is Green and have clear demarcated boundaries. You're switching to a literal boundary example where there are actual lines to be crossed. Colors are a fuzzy continuum; national boundaries, not including fought-over areas like the Sea of Japan, are easy to be in or not.

Rapzid•about 3 hours ago

> Colors are a fuzzy continuum

Denver is teal, the USA blue-green. Canada is Blue, and Mexico is green.

Their analogy is pretty on point.

TZubiri•about 2 hours ago

You are confusing geographical position with countries.

Countries are not a continuum, they start and end at some specific line defined by constitutions, mutually agreed by neighbours (or disputed through war and diplomacy) Colours have no such incentive for strict unified definitions, so there is no point at which blue ends.

TZubiri•about 2 hours ago

Wow, crazy to see someone thinking there's an official objective color definition

WesleyJohnson•about 2 hours ago

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 called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.

michaelmior•about 2 hours ago

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.

mikestorrent•about 2 hours ago

The term you're looking for is "qualia" - one's own experience of sensory inputs, which cannot be compared with others' except through allegory.

Nition•about 2 hours ago

I vividly remember my friend and I first thinking of this question during a sleepover at around 13 years old, as we stayed awake late talking about what seemed at the time like the deep philosophies of life. This isn't to say that it's a bad question, but more that it's funny how everyone seems to come up with this question independently at some point. I've read many others with the same question since.

dc96•about 2 hours ago

Yup, always wondered this as well! The word for each internal subjective experience is called qualia.

Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)

cbarrick•about 2 hours ago

Have I got a Wikipedia article for you!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

namanyayg•about 2 hours ago

We know for a fact that bees or dogs perceive color very differently. But in between humans, the perception of physical sensations can still be resolved when we consider near-identical genetics.

But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!

"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)

srathi•about 2 hours ago

If you want to explore it further, look up the philosophical aspects of the hard problem of consciousness. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

humanfromearth9•about 2 hours ago

It would be interesting to see if llms all share the same internal representation of red. It might hint towards how it works for humans.

Note: I'm not sure this is formulated well, or even if I am able to articulate this correctly.

humanfromearth9•about 2 hours ago

Chemistry is the same for each of us, as is physics, so I'd be inclined to think that red is the same red for everyone.

stevenhuang•40 minutes ago

You'd be inclined to, but no, of the little we do understand about human perception, we do understand enough by now to say that different people can genuinely experience and perceive the world differently, sometimes wildly so.

Look into aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), anendophasia (lack of inner voice).

14•about 2 hours ago

I have thought about this many times. The same could be asked about other senses as well like taste, do we both interpret the taste of a banana the same?

At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?

Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.

My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.

technothrasher•about 4 hours ago

Should this be called "Is my monitor's blue your monitor's blue?"

beejiu•about 3 hours ago

I got a 98-percentile result and realised my Mac had Night Shift turned on.

rootusrootus•about 4 hours ago

And what if you are wearing blue blocker readers? I am, and perhaps unsurprisingly my result was greener than average.

ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.

hermitShell•about 4 hours ago

Exactly, and how bright is your display compared to your surroundings at time of viewing?

TZubiri•about 2 hours ago

Maybe both are true, if someone grows up and learns through a specific monitor, maybe that will influence and define their blue definition.

yieldcrv•about 4 hours ago

followed by the number of rods and cones in your eyes, as well as their own sensitivity, as well as your language

Night_Thastus•24 minutes ago

This is also going to be very difficult because:

* HDR vs SDR mode

* Different monitors have different color replication ranges

* Monitor and OS color and brightness controls (brightness affects color perception)

* Interior lighting

* Monitor technology (LCD, OLED, etc)

Meaning even if a color was meant to be X, it just won't appear that way given the combinations above.

ticulatedspline•about 3 hours ago

72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".

my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess

crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.

Glyptodon•about 3 hours ago

I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-blue.

I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.

Seem to get ~172.

bandofthehawk•about 2 hours ago

I feel the same way, after the first couple of responses, I was just thinking it's blue-green. So I just had to pick randomly.

A better interface would have been to just show the final spectrum pic and slide to where you think the separation is.

fwip•about 2 hours ago

I suspect that asking people to pick on a visual spectrum would lead to most people clicking closer to the midpoint.

dekhn•6 minutes ago

0xWTF•about 1 hour ago

I came back as with a measure of 174 and a label of "true neutral".

However, I know enough about perception to know that this called for some hacking.

So as soon as I saw the second color I realized I needed to look at something else. So each time after choosing and seeing the next color I looked around quite a bit, inside and through the windows at the outside (I happen to be in a Hawaii, so blues and greens are abundant) before choosing and I noticed significantly different color perception after looking around, specifically, I had more confidence in whether it was blue or green.

I can imagine if you just stare at the colors and try to power through, you might get kinda irritated.

al_borland•5 minutes ago

I also got 174. I turned the brightness up on my phone (to about 65-70%) before starting, but that was it. No resetting my eyes between colors. Considering I’m red/green colorblind, and certain hues of green I see as gray, I’m pretty shocked by the result. I suspect having a binary choice helped a lot, as once it was no longer something I could consider blue, I’d call it green.

afandian•about 4 hours ago

Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced.

Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...

diziet•about 4 hours ago

There are colors in between blue and green that are neither blue nor green!

lokar•about 4 hours ago

Any system of giving names to hues will necessarily use ranges.

I think the intent here is clear in context.

gkhartman•about 4 hours ago

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.

AntiUSAbah•about 4 hours ago

I always wanted to have a color calibrator and a few years back i bought one.

all my displays were so well defined out of the box, it wasnot worth it at all. Like you would need to use this particular profile for proper real industry printers to even have any benefit of it if even because all my displays were well calibrated.

I would argue that this would only make sense for highly profesional graphics designer and i don't think this experiment requires this level of granularity.

swiftcoder•about 4 hours ago

A lot of the color calibration obsession was from back when panels shipped with truly awful factory calibration. A quick perusal of rtings suggests that most manufacturers try and pre-calibrate their panels these days

nomel•about 2 hours ago

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

porphyra•about 3 hours ago

There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Sky_with_a_White_Sun

keane•about 3 hours ago

Same with Old and Middle Irish (1200 AD): "glas was a blanket term for colors ranging from green to blue to various shades of gray"

I like to think this may have had something to do with them having both blue and green in their political usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_blue

balupton•about 2 hours ago

Same applies for grey, and many other colours and things. For Indonesian culture, grey is the colour of an overcast/hazy/dusty/ash/pale day, as such, it includes any desaturated colour, especially (most commonly) light blues; so for them two blue banknotes, one saturated and one desaturated are clearly different colours and they are perplexed as to why westerners mix them up. More research of this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms>. From my research, a lot of this comes from whether a culture's consideration of a colour is from natural phenomena, or from colour theory (mixing the primary colours to generate the secondary colours, developing color wheels, acquiring distinctions for hue, saturation, lightness, etc). Take "orange" in English, or "cokelat" (the colour brown, and chocolate) and "oranye" (to describe the colour of a ripe orange/"jeruk manis") in Indonesia. Sometimes with cross-cultural intermixing, an object could be named after a colour in one culture, then that object is injected into another culture, and that culture then names the colour after that object. Such cultural introductions also extends to mythology and affect, lighter shades could be considered young or easy (as is "muda" in Indonesian), white could be considered for pure or wealthy or sickly or light, dark for ground/earth or peasant or tanned/healthy, red for blood/danger or passion or love; blue-green for nausea or life/vitality/fertility; same also applies for gender and pronouns; man as in mankind, or man as in male, and their inter-cultural/educational corruption/degradations/influences/experiential-biases/subjectivity.

driverdan•about 1 hour ago

I looked up the banknotes since I was curious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_rupiah#/media/File:...

Is it the Rp2000 and Rp50000 that get mixed up? They seem obvious in that picture but it might be harder to tell them apart in low light.

hyperpape•about 4 hours ago

I think this site is doing a binary search, so that you narrow down on a boundary.

It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.

aaronharnly•about 4 hours ago

Yeah, as I was toggling "blue" / "green" / "blue" / "green" I had the distinct sensation that it might just show me that I was in a region where I couldn't even make a consistent distinction.

MrZander•about 4 hours ago

Interesting. Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center.

Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?

parpfish•about 2 hours ago

I've got a color question that I need some opinions on:

When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.

If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.

My question is: - I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there? - If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62531754/how-to-draw-a-h...

ramonaisonline•about 1 hour ago

The boundary regions at 3:00, 7:00, and 11:00 are composite colors that have ~2x the brightness compared to the primary colors of red, green, and blue. For someone without a color vision deficiency, they appear brighter than surrounding colors, but the saturation really only varies with distance from the center. For example, to me, the point at 3:00 on the edge of the circle is the peak of a "ridge" in brightness, but appears as a very saturated teal.

I have a colorblindness simulator on my computer called Sim Daltonism and when I use that on the color wheel, it does indeed appear to have white, desaturated lines radiating from the center at those three angles. In the simulator, the one at 11:00 is the strongest, followed by 3:00, and the 7:00 one is faintest. My hunch is that the perceptually uniform color space samples you're looking at have more uniform brightness, so those boundaries blend in to the surrounding colors better. They look nicer to me too -- they still represent saturated, composite colors like teal, but just at a pleasant, harmonious brightness. It's very interesting to compare perception!

ok_computer•about 2 hours ago

Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space

I think the bands you’re referring to are an artifact.

kasey_junk•about 2 hours ago

I’m not color blind and see a white barrier between 3 sections(it looks like a 3 piece pie) with lines at the green/blue red/blue and green/yellow boundaries.

No idea why

seba_dos1•about 1 hour ago

> I'm not color blind

Well... uhm, you may want to verify that claim.

ozten•about 1 hour ago

Showing the completion screen and giving the ability to use a slider to pick the center might be more useful.

adxl•34 minutes ago

I used to own a house in California which I swore was peach, my coworker told me face it the house is pink.

sega_sai•about 4 hours ago

One thing that I find interesting when thinking about colour perception, is that even if two people agree that a given colour is red, there is no way to know (as far as I am aware) that they actually perceive it in the same way. Maybe the brain of one person paints it red, and another paints it differently, and there is no way to know as we can't get into other people's heads.

MarkLowenstein•32 minutes ago

My suggestion is always to look at what colors people think "go together". A Westerner looking at a Chinese temple will say "ugh, saturated red, light blue, and gold, all together?" My own self looking at a shirt my Eastern European wife loves: "dark blue, gray, and orange, bleah". It suggests that depending on your culture, you may have adopted a different visual response, where blood color is harmonious with sky color, or something like that.

layer8•about 4 hours ago

That’s assuming that there is something like a “true” internal color that external colors are mapped onto. I think it’s more likely that for the brain, “red” is just “that hue signal range that red things have”. Which is roughly the same for everyone (modulo color blindness), in the sense that if one person sees two objects as red, another person will also see them as the same color, and will perceive the same brightness and hue relation relative to other objects with adjacent brightness and/or hue.

Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.

keane•about 4 hours ago

Quite right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

shagie•about 4 hours ago

I've got an anecdote that says that they don't.

If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.

rootusrootus•about 4 hours ago

yep, this is the sort of question I pose to my kids. “How can you know that what you see as blue is not what I see as red?”

VadimPR•about 4 hours ago

I find that fascinating as well! I hope tech will give us the answer in our lifetimes.

dbcurtis•about 4 hours ago

Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?

eecc•about 4 hours ago

Can you accommodate with the implant?

dbcurtis•about 4 hours ago

No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.

Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.

danbmil99•about 3 hours ago

Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see blue.

Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable

torginus•about 3 hours ago

I think your monitor or room lighting might just be different from others'

turboladen•about 3 hours ago

Same here at 82%, although I don’t think I’m seeing blues as black.

Insanity•about 1 hour ago

Would be cool to see a gender distribution. Women perceive more colours than men, wonder how it impacts this.

rendx•about 4 hours ago

> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.

drfloyd51•about 2 hours ago

Some languages don’t make a distinction. And if a language doesn’t have a word for green or blue it won’t have a word for brown or orange either.

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

aleph401•about 2 hours ago

In Japanese, the "go" traffic light is referred to as "blue."

lrobinovitch•about 4 hours ago

This is great!

Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/

dc96•about 3 hours ago

Noticing on my monitor that it's more blue if I tiptoe and look down, and it's obviously green when looking at below.

I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.

jumploops•about 2 hours ago

Curious how this looks for red/green colorblind folks?

Do they see everything beyond the initial green as a shade of blue?

--Edit--

My red/green colorblind father just got back me with this result:

> Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.

aidenn0•about 2 hours ago

Just last week I called something blue and my daughter objected; she said it was green. After discussion we both agreed it was was teal and she said roughly "but teal is a shade of green." To me Teal is a (admittedly greenish) shade of blue.

SamInTheShell•about 1 hour ago

Showed me teal but only have options for blue and green. Teal ain't either.

dang•about 4 hours ago

Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258 - Sept 2024 (527 comments)

Xcelerate•about 2 hours ago

My mind was blown once when I heard multiple people calling yellow Gatorade (lemon lime) green. I have no clue how anyone perceives it that way.

harrall•about 4 hours ago

One of my eyes sees (very) slightly greener than the other one.

But with both eyes I got

> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.

I should test with one eye.

red75prime•about 4 hours ago

I forgot that my display is in night mode (reducing blue light intensity). And I ended up with "your boundary is bluer than 98% of the population."

nubinetwork•about 4 hours ago

I must be colourblind, most of those look the same on my phone.

QuantumNomad_•about 4 hours ago

Same. There were like three different colors at first and then the remainder looked mostly the same.

Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.

I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.

I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.

turtleyacht•about 2 hours ago

> Your boundary is at hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.

Pretty sure I accidentally picked blue for a green once.

HoldOnAMinute•about 4 hours ago

>> Your boundary is at hue 177, bluer than 76% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.

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

dbcurtis•about 4 hours ago

It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans. It is more about what is average or median.

rationalist•about 4 hours ago

The About section at the end said most people average around 175.

hmokiguess•about 3 hours ago

Very relevant complementary reading: https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...

bojo•about 2 hours ago

While neat, I don't get consistent scores if I retry it a few times. If it leads with a series of greens first, my score is more green oriented, and vice versa.

caymanjim•about 2 hours ago

I wouldn't call most of those colors green or blue. Most of them looked identical to me as well. I ended up picking arbitrarily for all but the two I thought were distinctly one or the other.

FarmerPotato•about 3 hours ago

Thanks to the TMS9918, I know cyan when I see it! Years of seeing cyan on a composite monitor where hue is tricky to adjust. My tolerance for the amount of green allowed in cyan is higher. And if it's cyan, it's blue. I see I classified quite a few greenish as cyan therefore blue.

Rapzid•about 3 hours ago

I don't find this compelling as it seems to me it's well acknowledged there are colors that are BOTH. As in there are colors widely considered to be blue-green. Blue and Green.

jp57•about 3 hours ago

I have my doubts about the value of a two-alternative forced choice task for this. I was pretty much answering randomly both of the time because I wouldn't ncessarily have called either green or blue.

D-Machine•about 1 hour ago

Asinine and meaningless. Forces a classification on something that obviously anyone with fully-functioning colour vision will classify as "aquamarine" or "turquoise" or etc.

This has nothing at all to do with colour perception, or, if actual differences in perception are involved, this test fails to distinguish those from individual differences in assignment to linguistic categories.

EDIT: To actually test something like this, you need to make an assumption that cannot easily be tested or supported by evidence.

E.g. say we could all agree that, generally, blue + orange is a more pleasant pairing than blue + green. One might then imagine a series of images using orange + varying interpolations between blue and green, with the prompt being "is this combination of colours more or less aesthetically pleasing than the last". The average cutpoint could then be interpreted as a subjective judgement of where e.g. teals become "more blue", from an aesthetic / complementary standpoint. But this test does nothing of the sort.

mbo•about 4 hours ago

I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.

egonschiele•about 4 hours ago

Warm blue vs cool blue is another interesting social question: https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-colorful-controversy

coldtea•about 3 hours ago

If you're not colorblind, yes. More or less.

Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.

nox21125•about 4 hours ago

>> Your boundary is at hue 173, greener than 57% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.

very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.

wilj•about 4 hours ago

This is awesome! I have a slight case of tritanopia in one eye and it was neat to see the difference. My boundary is bluer by 59% in one eye and 87% in the other. It tracks with what I would have expected.

jameson•about 4 hours ago

"teal" is the name for color "Moderate bluish green"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal

chao-•about 4 hours ago

Yes, and since Teal is Cyan with 50% Value, you will often also see people use Cyan to refer to the boundary color between Blue and Green.

cyost•about 3 hours ago

It looks like this project got forked and updated further https://ismycolor.com/

fourthark•about 3 hours ago

Interesting, I got a completely different result on green/blue on this one, way more green whereas I got average on the individual test. Going between very different colors makes it hard to reset - they might consider breaks between spectra.

reassess_blind•about 2 hours ago

Tried it on two displays, one I’m 82% green, the other I’m 75% blue.

dueltmp_yufsy•about 4 hours ago

I was always fascinated by this kind of question as a kid. Like I would imagine that everyone had all the colors mixed up and we were each seeing something different.

layer8•about 4 hours ago

This only checks a single brightness level per hue. I bet that two people who agree for those levels might very well disagree at other levels, and vice versa.

malbs•about 3 hours ago

Also no way to account for the variation of LCD displays. The same "colour" can look different on two different panels

cwillu•about 2 hours ago

For some reason, dragging the window makes the chart re-animate.

iterateoften•about 4 hours ago

Im left delighted to find out something new, but left wanting to know how to use it.

Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.

glial•about 4 hours ago

Send it to a significant other, then discuss your differences. Will provide you with a new in-joke.

LocalH•about 2 hours ago

Also needs a button "this is both" for colors like cyan

stephenlf•about 3 hours ago

Fun. Are you accepting PRs? I would love to add a “share” button that shares the color I landed on

timnetworks•about 4 hours ago

> Your boundary is at hue 172, greener than 63% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.

isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?

chao-•about 4 hours ago

The "exact 50%", or the boundary between green and blue, is nominally hue 180, which is cyan. A search for the RGB, CMYK and HSL for turquoise yielded a few hue values from 171 to 174 (depending who you trust, and allowing for a bit of drift due to colorspace conversions). In any case, 171, 172, 173, and 174 are all on the green side of cyan.

OwlGoesHoot•about 2 hours ago

Man doesn’t understand teal the website

tjwebbnorfolk•about 4 hours ago

After 4 clicks, I can no longer decide whether it is green or blue. I would pick "neither" if it were offered

nektro•about 4 hours ago

> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.

anyfoo•about 3 hours ago

Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?

The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.

It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.

It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.

softbuilder•about 3 hours ago

I want this but for blue vs. purple.

freecodyx•about 3 hours ago

cyan is neither blue nor green

andai•about 2 hours ago

Pro tip, I had my device's blue light filter enabled.

I want to say that shifted my score a lot. But every time I play I get a pretty different score, even on the same screen calibration. So, uh...

wat10000•about 4 hours ago

I wonder how much of this is testing people's eyes/brains, and how much is testing their screens.

zuminator•about 4 hours ago

When the final threshold image was displayed, I felt that the boundary was too far over to the left and I had a fair amount of green on the blue side.

I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.

foxes•about 2 hours ago

I just took it to mean is this more blue or green rather than literally blue or green. Correct answer is then 180, anything else is clearly a fail :)

ece•about 3 hours ago

I got hue 175 twice, but bluer than 66% of the population once and 59% the second time.

u8080•about 3 hours ago

Midori

antisthenes•about 3 hours ago

This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?

There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.

moffkalast•about 4 hours ago

This is cyan!

nicebyte•about 4 hours ago

it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.

EDIT: in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue