Is My Blue Your Blue?

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

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.