I find the front page of this site to be very nicely done: a small handful of as-yet-unread classics, and a small handful of things-to-continue, and then new things.
Where I live, the sky would match a paint chip labeled “blue” far less often than it would match one labeled “white” or “silver” or “grey”. Certainly that’s clouds, but when we say “the sky”, don’t we mean “the color we see when we step outdoors and look up”? And even when the sky isn’t so full of water vapor as to look photographed in monochrome, it is sometimes blue and sometimes a brilliant turquoise-teal which many would call green, and on many days it spends some hours streaked with orange and salmon and gold and purple hues.
“The sky is blue” seems to carry over from general parlance as a placeholder for “an obvious truth”, into the stories of a school of thought who advocate for personal maps of truth formed by observation rather than by societal consensus. “The sky is blue” isn’t wrong, per se, but it can get wrong when it’s casually twisted into “the sky never looks white or purple or red or green”.
So on one level, leaning on platitudes like “sky is blue” as placeholders for “real truth” seems rather hypocritical. But I can easily project a level underneath that, where it’s knowingly used as a placeholder instead for “true-enough thing simplified to fit the understanding of society at large”, which offers a whole other read of its usage whether or not that level was intended. Then, of course, there’s the parallel level where “sky is blue” sincerely looks like a real truth to an author who spends more time writing about the importance of looking for truth than just going outside and looking at the world.
A question which might distinguish between those levels: In the most facts-based observation you can observe, what color is the grass?
To me, different grasses are different greens, which in the face of a language unsuited to differentiating those colors I categorize as the conditions that tend to invoke them. There’s a dry white-green, a mature pine-green, a new-growth yellow-green, and distinct from the happy-new-growth shade are a whole slew of sickly yellow-greens which tell me that the growing conditions are inhospitable in some way. If you can see any texture on a lawn, it’s because it’s not all the same color hitting your eyes—even if all the grass matched, which it doesn’t (paler toward the base of a stem, darker on the flat of a blade), the light and shadow would mean at least two different wavelengths of green-named light are making it into your eyes.
And similarly, any time I can see any sort of texture in the sky, I can infer that multiple visually-distinguishable colors are involved, not just a single blue.
I find the front page of this site to be very nicely done: a small handful of as-yet-unread classics, and a small handful of things-to-continue, and then new things.
The first section has led me into some of the old stuff—https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality/a-fable-of-science-and-politics to be exact—which strengthens my pattern-match on an undercurrent of writings here which had hitherto struck me as inarticulably odd: “the sky is blue”.
Where I live, the sky would match a paint chip labeled “blue” far less often than it would match one labeled “white” or “silver” or “grey”. Certainly that’s clouds, but when we say “the sky”, don’t we mean “the color we see when we step outdoors and look up”? And even when the sky isn’t so full of water vapor as to look photographed in monochrome, it is sometimes blue and sometimes a brilliant turquoise-teal which many would call green, and on many days it spends some hours streaked with orange and salmon and gold and purple hues.
“The sky is blue” seems to carry over from general parlance as a placeholder for “an obvious truth”, into the stories of a school of thought who advocate for personal maps of truth formed by observation rather than by societal consensus. “The sky is blue” isn’t wrong, per se, but it can get wrong when it’s casually twisted into “the sky never looks white or purple or red or green”.
So on one level, leaning on platitudes like “sky is blue” as placeholders for “real truth” seems rather hypocritical. But I can easily project a level underneath that, where it’s knowingly used as a placeholder instead for “true-enough thing simplified to fit the understanding of society at large”, which offers a whole other read of its usage whether or not that level was intended. Then, of course, there’s the parallel level where “sky is blue” sincerely looks like a real truth to an author who spends more time writing about the importance of looking for truth than just going outside and looking at the world.
A question which might distinguish between those levels: In the most facts-based observation you can observe, what color is the grass?
To me, different grasses are different greens, which in the face of a language unsuited to differentiating those colors I categorize as the conditions that tend to invoke them. There’s a dry white-green, a mature pine-green, a new-growth yellow-green, and distinct from the happy-new-growth shade are a whole slew of sickly yellow-greens which tell me that the growing conditions are inhospitable in some way. If you can see any texture on a lawn, it’s because it’s not all the same color hitting your eyes—even if all the grass matched, which it doesn’t (paler toward the base of a stem, darker on the flat of a blade), the light and shadow would mean at least two different wavelengths of green-named light are making it into your eyes.
And similarly, any time I can see any sort of texture in the sky, I can infer that multiple visually-distinguishable colors are involved, not just a single blue.