What's Up with All These Viral Illusions?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Here's whats up with all the illusions. I wrote in a previous comment that things go viral when each person exposed to a piece of content (sound, image, whatever) on average exposes it to more than one person. To steal from one of the replies I got, information virality can be understood in the same terms of biological virality Eg the SIR model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...
The answer to the question "why is X viral" comes down to "why do people feel compelled to share this". Optical/auditory illusions hit the sweet spot of causing universal disagreement without the disagreement falling along the tired lines of politics, demographics, and other pre-existing tribial lines. The disagreement is both universal and palatable.
What do two people do when they have a friendly disagreement? They seek a third opinion. And then the losing side seeks out two more opinions to prove their not crazy. Bam! virality. Eventually it gets to the point where random strangers on the subway are showing you their phone and asking what color is the dress.
I especially loved this line, because it's the exact question I immediately thought:
> Am I experiencing a hundred micro-yannys and laurels every day without knowing it? Joe Toscano, who studies auditory perception at Villanova University, couldn’t answer that question, perhaps because he, like everyone, is trapped in the prison of his own mind
Brains make up a lot of stuff, not to mention the filtering already done before the signals travel there.
* And the real lesson is that it's good at feeling like it's understanding, even if it's understanding very little.
This isn't remotely comparable to the rest of the illusions, because it's not an illusion. People were asked to choose between yellow and green to describe something that is, spectrally, about halfway between the two words. Everyone is seeing the same color (unlike the dress), but they're choosing different words to describe it.
Everyone isn't hearing the same word.
There is a significant difference between people classifying things differently when they exist right on the boundary between two classifications (ie two implementations of the same classification method will frequently disagree), and classifying things differently when the classifications are nowhere near each other (ie you’d hope an objective method has a significantly lower error rate).
The former is about the accuracy and precision of your measurements. The latter is about how you interpret them. Both are important, but are also different subjects.
If you find this interesting, I recommend checking out the Radio Lab episode on "Colors". They go as far as speculating that ancient cultures perceived fewer colors than we do, because colors like "blue" aren't common in the natural world so we never learned to "tune into" the visual stimuli that tell us something is blue until we started to create more blue things.
Given this fact, the whole thing is twitter click bait, over almost nothing at all. One may as well argue over the correct spelling of “yanny” and whether it should have two N’s or not.
[0] https://twitter.com/CloeCouture/status/996218489831473152
Anyway, I'm far more interested in how this Cloe person ran their ad-buying/"influencing" campaign to draw attention to this nothingburger that she/they are now trying to sell merchandise from.
There was a Flash animation from about 2001 done as a tribute to MAME. It is set to the tune of Irene Cara singing the theme to "Fame"; and every time the word "fame" is sung, the MAME logo is flashed on the screen. Given the low quality of Flash audio during those days, our ears wwre tricked and we all heard Irene Cara sing "MAME".