Is My Blue Your Blue?
An online color quiz that asks users to label a series of hues as “blue” or “green” is prompting debate about what such tests really measure: visual perception, language, or just monitor calibration. Commenters highlight technical and methodological issues — from display gamut, ambient lighting, and night‑mode filters to the lack of a “neither/teal” option and the influence of prior questions on later answers. Many also connect the results to cultural and linguistic differences in color naming, and to deeper philosophical questions about whether people ever truly experience the same “blue.”
Overall reaction to the site
- Many find the site fun, well-made, and satisfying to use, especially the final gradient visualization.
- Several people use it with partners/family to explain long‑standing disagreements about colors.
- Others dismiss it as “just wordplay” or “nonsensical,” because turquoise/cyan clearly feels like its own color, not blue or green.
Test design and methodological critiques
- Core complaint: forced binary choice (blue/green) when many samples look like “neither, it’s teal/turquoise/cyan.”
- Some stop the test early or answer randomly once colors become ambiguous, arguing this corrupts the data.
- Suggestions:
- Add a third “neither/ambiguous” option or allow graded responses (e.g., 0.7 green / 0.3 blue).
- Let users place a boundary directly on a gradient, or find both edges of an “ambiguous” band.
- Mix in contrastive trials (definite blue/green before ambiguous colors) to reduce “hysteresis” from the previous choice.
- Others defend the two‑alternative forced choice as standard psychophysics, but acknowledge wording should emphasize “more blue than green.”
Display, environment, and device issues
- Many note strong dependence on:
- Monitor calibration, gamut (sRGB vs wide‑gamut), and viewing angle.
- Night mode/blue‑light filters, True Tone/Redshift, brightness, ambient lighting, tinted glasses.
- Several users show large score shifts after disabling such filters or changing devices or window size.
- Some find their results consistent across devices; others see big variation run‑to‑run, attributing it to adaptation and context.
Color vision and individual differences
- Colorblind users (various types) report surprising or inconsistent results; some see midrange colors as gray.
- A few describe how colorblindness makes color a weak signal compared to luminance/contrast.
Language, culture, and categorization
- Extensive discussion of languages that lump blue and green (or split light/dark blue), and of terms like turquoise, teal, cyan.
- Many argue the test mainly measures naming/categorization, not raw perception.
- Some note that cultural labels can shift where people “draw the line” between blue and green.
Philosophical and meta points
- Several expected a qualia / “is my blue your red?” experiment and note this site only probes category boundaries.
- The author clarifies it’s an informal, entertainment‑focused psychophysics demo, built largely with an LLM and open‑sourced for extensions.