RichardKennaway comments on Mind Projection Fallacy - Less Wrong
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I see sky blue and bronze-ish brown, which I'd interpret as navy blue and black decolored by aggressive washing. I still voted "blue and black" as I'd still call clothes that color black in real life unless I'm being pedantic, and there's no way I'd call them gold.
If I didn't know where these came from and I was doing an XKCD color survey-like thing, I'd call the colors in the first bronze and mauve and those in the latter black and indigo. (I'm not a native English speaker.) I'd call the difference between the two blacks "striking" but not the difference between the two blues, so I picked "Just show me the results".
I wouldn't go as far as to call it a striking difference, but I perceive the first image's colours as lighter and more washed out than the second's.
My introduction to this illusion was walking into the office yesterday morning, and having a co-worker show me the picture on their monitor while asking what colour the dress was. The office split fairly evenly between white & gold versus blue & black, and nobody seemed to be kidding/trolling.
The weird specificity of a couple of people's experiences also suggested they were being serious. One person who originally saw white & gold, after skimming blog posts discussing/explaining the illusion, eventually said they could kiiiinda see how it could be seen as blue & black (but that could've been a social conformity effect). Another person saw the dress as white & gold on their computer screen, but saw it as visibly blue & black when viewing their screen's image through someone's smartphone, which presented it with lower brightness.
So I deem this legit. I think this illusion messes with people so successfully by turning the relatively well-known brightness/saturation illusion (as in the checker shadow illusion) into a colour illusion, by exploiting the facts that (1) very light blue looks white, (2) brown looks like yellow/gold or black depending on intensity, and (3) perceived intensity depends on the surroundings as well as the region of focus.