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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

I barely see these color differences, but swapping pairs clearly shows what’s wrong. It is like a bubblesorting by hand.

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> swapping pairs clearly shows what’s wrong. It is like a bubblesorting by hand.

I found exactly the same, looking at the overall gradient only gets you so far. I wonder if the magnitude of the statistic of 1 in 255 women and 1 in 12 men have more to with how many people figure out how to effectively sort things without being explicitly told than it has to do with colour - perhaps if an equivalent subtle sorting test was done with something other than colour it would reveal a similar statistic.

The difference is definitely genetic. Colorblindness is generally caused by recessive genes that are part of the X chromosome. That means that the proportion of men who are colorblind is basically equal to the proportion of X chromosomes with one of these recessive genes. Women have two sets, so they need the gene on both chromosomes in order to exhibit colorblindness. This means that their proportion of colorblindness is roughly the square of that of men (actually less because there are different types of colorblindness).

Yes but i'm talking about the statistic having a potentially invalid baseline because of the method of testing gives some people an advantage separate from physical ability to perceive colour depending on how they complete the test.

Could we not also correct by simply telling the participants this technique (I used it too and have the same experience of only being 100% sure after bubble sort)

Yes, but it's probably more reliable to just construct a test that forces them to compare in a pairwise sort, than try to explain how to do it.

the trick for me was to compare i and [i + 2] rather than i and [i + 1]. If you're not sure which card is which, rather than swapping them, move one of them so there's a card between it and the other card.

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