If someone were to tell me that they were color blind, then I have no problem using their label in conversation with them. The context in which this question occurred to me was a discussion about how to select a set of colors for an application that would be clearly distinguishable from one another for as many users as possible. It made me wonder if there was a more suitable term.
Overthinking is my super power…
Whenever I find a coworker’s lost keys or whatever, I always say I had the unfair advantage of not being distracted by colors.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense.
Fair enough, and thanks for the explanation!
My (similarly clumsily expressed) point was intended to be just that if the adjectival form is appropriate and accepted, then maybe the noun should be used as well.
That said, you’re right that I didn’t fully understand your (perfectly salient) point at first, and now I do. And the OP’s response helped me see your point better, FWIW.
Cheers!
I’ve read that, in species whose evolutionary past included foraging for fruits and vegetables in groups, there is a steady rate of around 2% or 3% of color blindness, because it confers an advantage on groups (not individuals). Usually individuals with the typical kind of color vision will spot food sources, but some sources will be very difficult for them to spot and yet easy for the color blind group members. Thus, a group that includes a small number of such individuals will perform better than a group without any.
For this reason, also, bomber crews often strategically include a color blind member, so the crew’s ability to spot targets is more complete.
If anybody knows more about this and can check me, please do!
Also this brings up an interesting side note: does this cast color blindness in a more positive way? or does it imply there’s something inherently bad about color blind individuals such that we need to find a positive with which to counter it, a justification for them? This subtle point comes up in a variety of DE&I topics.
This has come up in some past threads, although I’m not recalling a definitive answer. Certainly this notion has been around going back to WWII bombers. I’m not so sure at bombing altitudes it would have any use. The concept I’ve heard most often is that colorblind people are not fooled by camoflauge or enemy soldiers hiding in the foliage.
I’m pretty sure this is untrue. Even at the height of WWII when the USAAF was hurting for every body it could get, being color-blind disqualified you for being a pilot. But you could certainly be aircrew. and while a specific type of color-blindness might give you a slight advantage to picking out concealed targets, strategic bombing runs were usually on preset coordinates, not targets of opportunity. I don’t see a situation where crews were strategically selecting a color-blind member as an advantage.
Coincidentally it was a former Air Force doctor who had the test cards to confirm my anomalous condition. I was on the line for qualifying as a pilot, and would likely be rejected these days because there was no lack of pilots with no colorblindness but I imagine in WWII they might have let me through if I seemed qualified otherwise. OTOH I don’t think my form of colorblindness would be at all useful in bombing runs or finding Waldo.
Certainly during the WWII era camouflage was developed by people with normal color vision to fool other people with normal color vision. Because colorblind people literally see it differently it doesn’t fool them. (At least, it didn’t - I have no idea if modern camouflage takes this sort of thing into account.) This is not just because of the color differences, it’s also because the colorblind tend to pay more attention to texture and outline than those with normal color vision.
Where colorblind “spotters” were used most was in analyzing color photographs (rare and very expensive back then, but the military did use color photography). If they went along on a flight it would be in an attempt to spot something under something like camouflage netting or the like.
There were apparently colorblind snipers as well. Again, they were less likely to be fooled by camo and more likely to spot enemy soldiers hiding in bushes and the like.
This is also affected by the type of color deficiency. People who were truly red/green blind, who only had two working types of cone cells rather than three, were much better at seeing through camouflage than people who were “color weak” with a partially functioning third cone. Red/green colorblindness worked better for spotting people and stuff in foliage, or for spotting khaki camo. I don’t know if there were special roles for blue/yellow colorblindness, which is less common and not sex-linked, or how that would have worked out.
If anything, they’re more likely to take someone with “color deficiency” these days than back in WWII. My understanding is that back in WWII the ban on color-variant pilots was absolute.
My deuteranomaly did not pose a bar to me getting my civilian pilot’s license… in the US. There are other countries that not only bar the colorblind from flying as pilots, they also bar them from getting driver’s licenses as well.
I just spent a while searching this topic, and found a lot of hints but no solid confirmation. I now doubt that “bomber crews often strategically include a color blind member”, but wonder if there might have been occasional hints that it could be a good idea, or inadvertent discoveries that when it occasionally happened it seemed beneficial, or things like that.
I’ve had two eye doctors who referred to it as “color deficient”. I can’t pass an Ishihara test, and have never been able to. I now refuse to take them, as it has zero impact on one’s prescription, and it makes me cranky when a tech says something like “ooh, you really can’t see that?” No, I can’t, and fuck off. Even worse is when someone says “So what color is my shirt?” It’s yellow, you asshole. ::angry rant over::
I could certainly imagine it as oft-repeated legend, with only a tangential relationship to whatever event or fact kicked off the first rumor.
Modern camouflage practice is sorta the other way. Back in the 1980s when I was doing this stuff the netting with fake leaf-like foliage was intended to fool visual observation. Breaking up the shape, hiding the angles, and more or less blending color-wise into the surrounding terrain or foliage was the underlying intent. Nets were available in various colors to better fit various terrain / foliage / snow situations.
The clever folks at the labs soon realized that by exploiting so-called hyper-spectral imaging, these nets stood out like sore thumbs in IR or UV or under microwave radar illumination or whatever. In other words they were easy to spot with super-human vision, not with sub-normal human vision.
So of course reconnaissance pods and satellite imagers were quickly programmed to take advantage of this new-found knowledge. And camo nets were re-designed to “look” like bare dirt or foliage or snow or whatever in UV, IR, and as many other areas of the spectrum as could cost-effectively be managed.
Did you find anything that would say how a colorblind crew member would be helpful on a WWII bomber? I understand the concept that some color based camouflage may not be effective against colorblind people, but how would it help on WWII bombing runs?
Well, this is it already, right here! Camouflaging targets may not be effective.
I can’t speak to colorblindness specifically, but note that not all WWII bombing was the classic high altitude straight and level target overflight of massed B-17 / -24 / -29 / etcs “aiming” in pre-planned attacks at pre-surveyed factories, railyards, harbors, city centers, etc.
A lot of bombing was done by smaller medium and light bombers. Who generally just flew about at low-ish altitude over an area expected to contain useful targets then made impromptu attacks on whatever they might spot. One of the advantages of WWII over more recent conflicts is the tendency of the enemy to wear uniforms, use distinctively military equipment, etc. As well as the then-negligible sensitivity to enemy non-combatant casualties. If it looked expensive or hard to replace, it was a valid target. Better an overtly military one than a simple ordinary building, but a lot of just basic counter-economic bombardment went on too. Nobody brought perfectly good bombs back unexpended if they could find anything plausible to attack.
In these lower and closer encounters it’s not insane on its face that color blindness, or the accommodations a lifelong sufferer had made to it, might occasionally provide a benefit in certain lighting or camouflage conditions to spot something suspicious looking or even a good target in the open.
Unlike the case for high altitude mass-raid bombing, where the idea of a color-blind advantage is just IMO silly.
Ok, @LSLGuy answered the question that I intended by pointing out that some bombing runs were low altitude where camouflage could work. I was considering the high altitude bombings and I didn’t think factory buildings and the like would be camouflaged in a way that a colorblind person could see better than the non-colorblind. I’m not convinced that the story or the ability of colorblind people to not be confused by camouflage is true, but at least it makes sense for smaller targets attacked from lower altitude. IIRC, even without camouflage high altitude bombers were terrible at hitting clearly visible targets.
The prevailing theory for the benefits of mammalian trichromatic color vision is indeed for the selection of ripe fruits. It’s not the only theory, there are also theories of e.g. recognizing social clue via facial flush in a mostly hairless ape cohort. As for the benefits of actual color blindness within a species that is mostly not color blind, in a relative sense, the research is less established. It’s a theory that comes up, but perhaps not the most parsimonious or testable theory.
That makes…some…sense, but… a major flaw in that theory is that if it’s your first time to see a new fruit in the wild then you don’t know what color ‘ripe’ is for that type of fruit regardless of your color vision ability. It’s only after the experience of a few different colors of the same type of fruit that you will learn what is the preferred color for that fruit. A ‘color blind’ person will still be able to pick out the ripe-ish fruit because they have their own color library for reference. It may not be the same as a normal person’s color library but it does the same job. E.G. You know the difference between brown and green. We know the difference between browny-green and greeny-brown.
Different forms of color-blindness can make it difficult to differentiate ripe form unripe from over ripe fruit. Some color-blind people don’t have a complete palette of colors. Some have only B&W vision.
In general though, how particular traits are beneficial is difficult to determine.
I know, I’m one of them and I used the enchroma glasses to see colors that I had never seen before, so I know something about how deficient I am. The point was that most of us red/green deficient can still learn what’s ripe and what isn’t. We use color smell touch shape etc.