🇺🇦 Sean Prophet ⚛<p>Gaddammit, it happened again.</p><p>Someone posted this damn <a href="https://blacksun.social/tags/optical" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>optical</span></a> <a href="https://blacksun.social/tags/illusion" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>illusion</span></a> ("The circle has no yellow in it, yo?")</p><p>The first image has been circulating for awhile. It's an example of the Munker-White illusion, or the Bezold effect, and it's well understood.</p><p>I made this tryptych image back in 2020, to demonstrate what's going on. I do kind of know what I'm talking about here, since I was a TV/Film <a href="https://blacksun.social/tags/colorist" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>colorist</span></a> for many years.</p><p>The second panel is the first panel blurred. You can clearly see that the "yellow" circle is grey.</p><p>But, the third panel demonstrates that when you remove the color cast from the entire image, the circle becomes yellow. (In the first image, your brain perceives it as "yellow-er" than the blue background).</p><p>This is what your brain is doing all the time, as you move through different lighting conditions which is how you can still tell someone is wearing a green shirt, in a room with only red lights, so long as there are other colors in the room to compare it to.</p><p>When I tried to explain relative color perception to this person, the whole thread devolved into one of the dumbest conversations I've ever had about absolute vs. relative truth, statistics sample size, and how we can "never be really sure of anything," including when we measure temperature with a thermometer. </p><p>GAAAHHHHH!</p><p>New Rule: Optical illusions, outside of a *strict scientific context* having to do with understanding <a href="https://blacksun.social/tags/cognition" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>cognition</span></a> and the brain's visual system are a Trojan Fucking Horse for <a href="https://blacksun.social/tags/nonsense" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>nonsense</span></a> </p><p>People, please stop using optical illusions, to push <a href="https://blacksun.social/tags/solipsism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>solipsism</span></a> and <a href="https://blacksun.social/tags/relativism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>relativism</span></a></p>