I would be disinclined to that course, but hard-pressed to justify it more effectively than by my idiosyncratic generalization of one of a number of principles I have heard - I quote from the post:
Don't try to rewrite history. Look, we make mistakes. We all do. Sometimes we post an essay and we get stuff wrong in it. Sometimes that stuff makes the whole essay wrong. Sometimes, we put up an essay innocently and it turns into a firestorm of controversy we never meant. Sometimes, we find ourselves in a crucible on all sides.
The temptation is to go back. Revise. Reword what we said. Take the essay down entirely.
It is never a good idea. Ever.
I don't think you have anything to be ashamed of in this post. It's not deep, it's not extraordinary in its conclusions, but it is correct and brief. The complaints seem to me best addressed by elaboration and discussion - things which require far more than a brief edit placed at the end of the post.
As SilasBarta mentioned, there's a lot of commentary on this post that is worth preserving, and should be preserved with the original post. It would be unfair to the commenters to render their comments incomprehensible - even briefly - by distortion of that to which they responded.
And, if I may be frank, if the idea which inspired this post is interesting, it is probably capable of generalization. The idea of my own which I promoted to a post I did so because I saw that it was applicable beyond the scope of its origination, and in a manner which was natural, elegant, and interesting. It proved of interest to a number of people here, despite its unabashedly algebraic treatment. If you can find a profitable extension of your concept, it will be likely to be worth reporting in a followup post (and if you are concerned about the appropriateness of it, I - as one remaining upvoter of the OP - will have sent my email to you in a PM, and be willing to comment on any draft you wish to send).
If you cannot find a profitable extension of your concept, it is probably not worth the time to revise. Consider your post dubiously successful (it is still in positive territory, is it not?) and leave it be.
I don't think you have anything to be ashamed of in this post. It's not deep, it's not extraordinary in its conclusions, but it is correct and brief. The complaints seem to me best addressed by elaboration and discussion - things which require far more than a brief edit placed at the end of the post.
It's not so much that I am ashamed; I am just frustrated. The behavior of this post caught me completely off-guard. It was upvoted to +5 within a few hours and people started asking questions. After my responses, the post dropped to +1. The karma itself does...
Today I looked at the above illusion and thought, "Why do I keep thinking A and B are different colors? Obviously, something is wrong with how I am thinking about colors." I am being stupid when my I look at this illusion and I interpret the data in such a way to determine distinct colors. My expectations of reality and the information being transmitted and received are not lining up. If they were, the illusion wouldn't be an illusion.
The number 2 is prime; the number 6 is not. What about the number 1? Prime is defined as a natural number with exactly two divisors. 1 is an illusionary prime if you use a poor definition such as, "Prime is a number that is only divisible by itself and 1." Building on these bad assumptions could result in all sorts of weird results much like dividing by 0 can make it look like 2 = 1. What a tricky illusion!
An optical illusion is only bizarre if you are making a bad assumption about how your visual system is supposed to be working. It is a flaw in the Map, not the Territory. I should stop thinking that the visual system is reporting RGB style colors. It isn't. And, now that I know this, I am suddenly curious about what it is reporting. I have dropped a bad belief and am looking for a replacement. In this case, my visual system is distinguishing between something else entirely. Now that I have the right answer, this optical illusion should become as uninteresting as questioning whether 1 is prime. It should stop being weird, bizarre, and incredible. It merely highlights an obvious reality.
Addendum: This post was edited to fix a few problems and errors. If you are at all interested in more details behind the illusion presented here, there are a handful of excellent comments below.