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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

I got hue 174 as my threshold and really I just wanted to say "neither, this is turquoise/teal" for most of the questions. But blue/green was the only option.

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I got hue 175. It's interesting to note that some older cultures, Japan for example, didn't always have separate words for blue and green, both were the same color ("ao" in Japanese). You can see the effects of this even today with things like traffic lights in Japan, which are considered "green" by their standards but blue by many others' standards.

There are also other cultures, such as Russia, where light blue / dark blue (simplification) are effectively considered separate colors.

All this to say, personally, I think we will continue to evolve to recognize more distinct "colors" such as teal, which is neither blue nor green but somewhere between. A lot of this recognition power is rooted in linguistics and culture, it's not as strictly biological as one might think.

In Russian light blue is “blue” and dark blue is “indigo” essentially. It still has seven colors in the rainbow. It’s just that in English colloquially nobody uses indigo.

Yes, well that's what I mean. Culturally, Russians think and speak about colors differently, dividing them up differently than the West.

> Russian does not have a single word referring to the whole range of colors denoted by the English term "blue". Instead, it traditionally treats light blue (голубой, goluboy) as a separate color independent from plain or dark blue (синий, siniy), with all seven "basic" colors of the spectrum (red–orange–yellow–green–голубой/goluboy (sky blue, light azure, but does not equal cyan)–синий/siniy ("true" deep blue, like synthetic ultramarine)–violet) while in English the light blues like azure and cyan are considered mere shades of "blue" and not different colors.

> Blue: plava (indicates any blue) and modra; in the eastern speaking areas modra indicates dark blue, in some of the western areas it may indicate any blue

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

I am not deeply knowledgeable on Russian, I failed Russian in high school, just going off of my surface-level knowledge of linguistic relativity regarding color, and discussions with a friend from that part of the world, so I might not know what I'm talking about here.

That’s a bit complicated. The difference between синий and голубой is not really a difference in hue, it’s a difference in brightness.

It tends to be true that hues tending towards green are perceived more brightly than hues tending towards red, which means that blues with more green in them are more likely to be голубой, but by virtue of the fact they are perceived to be brighter.

But in principle, the line is drawn horizontally on the colour chart (or at least diagonally), not vertically.

Thanks for this comment! I dabble in fountain pens a bit, and one of my favorite inks is "ao" by Taccia.

Now it all makes sense (tho, to my eye it's kind of a blurple–royal blue; I get no green or teal from it. But, now I'm tempted to go do a blotter of it and look at it extra carefully in natural light.)

The point is to determine whether turquoise to you is more green, or more blue.

The color name question here doesn't have a clear answer because most of the respondents would call this "teal", "blue–green", "turqoise", "cyan", "aqua", or some similar name. You'd get somewhat similar results asking whether an orange (the fruit) is really "red" or "yellow", or whether an eggplant is really "blue" or "red".

An individual person's answers on this kind of question are likely to vary from day to day, are context dependent (i.e. whether one object or another appears more "green" or "blue" depends on what kind of object it is), and colors this intense are very sensitive to changes in eye adaptation and technical details of the display and software, as well as inter-observer metamerism.

So in addition to the color naming difficulties, it's not even a very good test of color naming, if you want to get reliable psychometric/linguistic data.

For a single individual, all of the above is true, but for a large enough sample size, the answers may be more generally useful because you account for all of those rounding errors.

No, because if my case holds more genera (and I suspect it does), the answers are in part out of sheer frustration, and therefore prone to being similar to the last one given.

I am not afraid to say this is poorly designed.

Unlikely, I'd expect most people to not have a meltdown about this.

As someone who rage-quit on the third question, I'm going to say that frustration is a likely experience.

I didn't exactly rage quit but did think it was silly.

I wouldn't describe teal as blue or green any more than I'd describe purple as red or blue, so being forced to pick felt silly. Like being forced to choose my seventh favorite Norwegian glacier - technically its a valid question but my answer is necessarily going to be arbitrary.

That’s like asking which way a Necker cube is oriented. It’s both and neither. For blue and green, there’s a range of shades for which that ambiguity is true and you can “flip” it in your mind.

I would actually find it more practical to determine the thresholds on both sides where I find it to become ambiguous.

> I would actually find it more practical to determine the thresholds on both sides where I find it to become ambiguous.

Isn't that the point of this exercise?

No, it assumes there's a singular point where it is ambiguous, whereas I'm saying it's a range within which it's ambiguous.

Not as far as I can tell. The phrasing of the question test does not acknowledge such ambiguity to start with, and by forcing them to answer one way or the other the test does not allow the users to signal perceived ambiguity even if they wanted to.

So how could the point of this exercise possibly be to find the range of ambiguity?

Fun, I got 174 and when I saw the results my reaction was "but that is not turquoise!" which I suppose means I either don't know what turquoise is, or my screen has bad calibration/gamut.

I got 174 as well.

Me too... Apple Silicon era MBA, with Samsung 4K display with corresponding U28D590 driver...

I don't think those specs make a difference. You would need a wide gamut display and a hardware calibrator to be sure you were looking at the colour as it should be

Nobody knows what turquoise is

Funny, 174 by me too.

Here is a chart of HN reader results, based on two pages of comments: https://i.imgur.com/tIQfTjN.png

Mean is 176 Median is 175 Mode is 174

Me too, but I liked the conclusion ("to you, turquoise is blue/green")

That must be the perfect result. I also got 174 but it said "For you, turquoise is green."

176 for me its blue

180 and blue and I suspect that language also plays a part (I was brought up in an environment where the word turquoise starts with green, but now live in a turquoise-producing state where the finished product look far blue-r.)

i mean i always saw turquoise as a greenish light blue, so it kinda makes sense

But it isn't. Turquoise is turquoise, and since that wasn't an option, I picked one at random.

The whole point is demarcating the line between where colors seem more-blue-than-green, and more-green-than-blue.

That wasn't clearly part of the test. To be ultra-pedantic (this is HN after all), the user's choices don't say "This is more-blue-than-green" and "This is more-green-than-blue". The choices are only "This is green" and "This is blue" forcing you to just pick one, where there is no clearly correct choice. When the color on the screen is neither green nor blue, many people will just pick a random answer.

I bet if the choices actually said "This is more green than blue" the results would be different.

> When the color on the screen is neither green nor blue, many people will just pick a random answer.

Or people will naturally intuit that they should choose whichever answer they think is closer to true.

Turquoise is blue with green , so if it asked me to pick I’d pick green. Because if they have eggs then pickup a dozen milks HN pedant here

Or most likely people will come out with a severe feeling of dissatisfaction with the results.

On such a random internet doodad most users will pick a random answer period. To see what this thingy tries to do without wasting any time on it. I hope it doesn't try to do gather any meaningful data.

Personally I "tried" to answer truthfully at first and then went absolutely "ok f u, don't care no more" when it showed turquoise :D

> most users will pick a random answer period.

Taking how you behave, and extrapolating that it to everyone, (and furthermore being unable to accept that other people might behave differently), is not a winning strategy for life.

There is no winning in life. And I'm doing fine tyvm ;)

Not feeling blue?

Pretty turquoise, green even!

because of, or despite?

My whole family tested this and nobody had the same reaction as you.

Just to add my own anedcote to the database.

It's different when you show something to someone with intent. Of course they will pay attention. Especially your family, come on.

I'm talking about random day to day browsing when you stumble on something random on the internet.

Sounds like you're just a low-engagement user tbh

According to conversion rates and engagement metrics of most apps I've seen (not even mentioning social media where 2-3% engagement is the norm) most users are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Unless said app is a work/hobby tool, but that shouldn't be really called engagement.

Turqoise doesn't feel either more-green-than-blue or more-blue-than-green. It feels neither blue nor green, and I don't see any way to compare it to either.

It's clearly more turqoise than blue. Or green.

Turqoise on a computer monitor is always missing part of itself, so maybe I should've answered based on that, but I don't think the computer monitor was the point.

It’s not a line though, it’s a range where you can see it either way, like a flipping Necker cube.

To be honest, when I got turquoise and had to choose blue or green, I just thought "oh whatever" and picked one randomly.

Same here... Then again, natural turquoise can appear more blue or green in nature too.

I actually disliked the conclusion, because it forced me to classify turquoise as either blue or green. When it's a mix more than anything.

It lacks the "can't classify" to make it a better tool.

yeah kind of a waste of time, what is this 50% mixture of green and blue? pick one - Blue or Green

answer it should have: Its both

You could look at it as “How much yellow do I have to add to my blue until I no longer consider it blue and instead consider it turquoise”

it looks like my default is if there is 40% green in that it is green. Thus it told me that turquoise for me is green. Which if I look at Turquoise the RGB color, that is green. If I look at Turquoise the mineral about half the time it is green and half the time blue.

Same thinking here, though I got 184

Same, my answer was “neither” after the third color so I just alternated between blue and green until it stopped.

Try looking away between tests.

I tried twice and got 182, then 184. Which I suppose it more or less consistent.

"Neither" is the coward's choice.

Is a crab a mammal or a reptile?

I'm not gonna fight you on that.

Is a hot dog a sandwich?

Of course. It's a bologna sandwich in log form.

>It's a bologna sandwich in log form.

Finally someone else realizes that hotdogs are basically just bologna.

Is a burrito a sandwich?

(Yes in New York and Indiana, no in Massachusetts, and the law is silent elsewhere. Personally I believe that because the torta exists, the burrito may have some characteristics of a sandwich but should be considered a wrap)

No, it's a calzone, per https://cuberule.com/

It's an insect. 6 legs, exoskeleton, etc.

I know you're making a joke about classification, but crabs have 10 legs, not 6.

My bad, I misremembered. 6 walking legs, two swimming legs, two pincer legs.

Logically, a color, green etc., is a 'simple' notion and cannot be explained terms of anything simpler. With color we have to revert to a different description, here wavelength. But wavelength is not human perception (and we can't explain such perception in simpler terms).

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