A relative of mine tried getting stoplights to be red and blue (since that color blindness is rare to nonexistent). But they never persuaded anyone.

Meanwhile, the Japanese figured it out on their own and went with it.

Looking again at the original piece, it seems to me that this is an example of the zombie proof by deference to authority.

One of the key differences between argument on the left versus the right is the role of authority. A right wing troll will usually begin an argument by riffing off a statement made by someone they consider to be an authority. If the person happens to be a Democrat, it will be asserted that ‘even liberals’.

Such arguments hold little weight on the left today. We have all heard too many specious arguments attributed to Marx or Adam Smith. The idea that the complex interactions of a modern political economy were fully understood and solved by a man who died before the development of the internal combustion engine has always been absurd.

Here we see the ideological mind at work. They find a fanciful theory attributed to a great man. They wonder if it has been overlooked! Then instead of seeking to disprove their new pet theory, they look for evidence to support it.

In general, any assertion based on small n psychology samples needs to be taken with considerable skepticism. And the same goes for large. It is really hard to measure any effect in laboratory setting without contaminating the result.

perhaps the insensibility is related to misperception of culurs.

Although I’m not colorblind, it has always struck me as strange that we use red and green lights to indicate stop and go for traffic, that we use red to imply bad and green to imply good in so many visuals and graphics, despite the fact that up to 10% of males in a population are red-green colorblind.

Well, they certainly would not have known what they were (drifting debris? weird sea creatures?). But if the claim is that they would be invisible, well certainly not. If strange and unfamiliar things were thereby invisible to our perception, we’d have gone extinct long ago.

Reminds me of another ridiculous claim floating around from that execrable movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” – that American or Carib Indians literally could not see the sailing ships of arriving Europeans because they had no cultural reference to such contraptions.

Interesting.
In Irish “glas” means, totally unsurprisingly, “green”

Sure. But then, that’s what one should say. And how the headline should read. Cause, you know. 🙂

That may be. I’m not an ornithologist, alas.