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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

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