Human language isn’t great for talking about colors. The word “blue”, for example, encompasses very different hues.
Let’s think about this in terms of the HSV (hue, saturation, value) model.
In this model, whitish colors have low saturation, high value (value is basically brightness), and the hue doesn’t matter. Similarly, blackish colors have high saturation, low value, and the hue doesn’t matter again.
The dress in this image has the blue hue, but high value (=brightness). That makes it light blue or bluish white—take your pick. The other color has the orange hue, but low value. That makes it dark brown (gold) or brownish black, again, take your pick.
Overlay on top of this the differences in uncalibrated monitors, personal idiosyncrasies, and some optical illusion effects, and you have a ridiculously successfull buzzfeed post :-D
Yeah, that’s a pale blue, but I find it hard to alieve (and, had I not read Generalizing From One Example, I’d also find it hard to believe) that a sizeable fraction of the population find it pale enough to call it “white” non-trollingly. This also applies if I look at it on a dark background such as the left panel of XKCD with my screen’s luminosity set to the maximum. (The only condition in which I would call such a thing “white” is if I thought it only looked like that because of the ambient light, but under so blue a light the dark parts of the dress would look quite black with hardly any trace of yellow whatsoever.)
Oh, dear Lord, this made it even to LW… X-/
Human language isn’t great for talking about colors. The word “blue”, for example, encompasses very different hues.
Let’s think about this in terms of the HSV (hue, saturation, value) model.
In this model, whitish colors have low saturation, high value (value is basically brightness), and the hue doesn’t matter. Similarly, blackish colors have high saturation, low value, and the hue doesn’t matter again.
The dress in this image has the blue hue, but high value (=brightness). That makes it light blue or bluish white—take your pick. The other color has the orange hue, but low value. That makes it dark brown (gold) or brownish black, again, take your pick.
Overlay on top of this the differences in uncalibrated monitors, personal idiosyncrasies, and some optical illusion effects, and you have a ridiculously successfull buzzfeed post :-D
Yeah, that’s a pale blue, but I find it hard to alieve (and, had I not read Generalizing From One Example, I’d also find it hard to believe) that a sizeable fraction of the population find it pale enough to call it “white” non-trollingly. This also applies if I look at it on a dark background such as the left panel of XKCD with my screen’s luminosity set to the maximum. (The only condition in which I would call such a thing “white” is if I thought it only looked like that because of the ambient light, but under so blue a light the dark parts of the dress would look quite black with hardly any trace of yellow whatsoever.)
I see the same shade of pale blue while walking to work over white snow.