atorm comments on A Fable of Science and Politics - Less Wrong

113 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 December 2006 04:50AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (93)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Adam 05 April 2007 10:20:30PM 0 points [-]

Great parable, but I don't think things would actually happen like that. If that really happened, a Green would almost certainly see the sky as just as green as a Blue would see it blue. Light underground is probably of substandard quality most of the time, no pigments underground exactly match the color of the sky, there have been experiments that have shown that native speakers of different languages will classify the same color as closer to different colors based on their native language. The Greens and the Blues may have the same language but their perception could change if they were raised and lived in their own isolated group.

Finally, there are some human above-ground cultures for which the color of the sky and the color of vegetation are the same word, Hawaiian uliuli for example. So we can just say it's all uliuli and then there's no more possible debate at all anyway.

Comment author: atorm 08 November 2011 04:37:23AM 3 points [-]

Just like we can just say it's cerulean, right?

Comment author: FeepingCreature 16 August 2012 05:23:45PM *  0 points [-]

I think his point was that the greens and blues probably used the terms green and blue in a matter that describes an empirically different aspect of the world from how we use them.