content/drafts/comment-on-the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-and-probabilistic-inference.md

   1 Title: Comment on Cibelli, Xu, <em>et al.</em>'s "The Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis and Probabilistic Inference: Evidence From the Domain of Color"
   2 Date: 2021-01-01
   3 Category: commentary
   4 Tags: categorization, convention, review (paper)
   5 Status: draft
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   7 [This is a cool paper about how language affects how people remember colors!](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158725) You would expect that the design of the eye and its colorspace to be human-universal (_modulo_ [colorblindness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness) and [maybe some women with](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans) [both](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW) [kinds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW2) of green opsin gene), but not all languages have the same set of color words. There are some regularities: [all languages have words for light and dark; if they have a third color word, then it's _red_; if there's a fourth, it'll cover green or yellow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms)—but the details differ, as different languages [stumbled onto different conventions](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/). Do the color category conventions in one's native tongue affect how people think about color, in accordance with the famous [Sapir–Whorf hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)? Maybe—but if so, how??
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   9 Our authors discuss an experiment where people are briefly shown a color, and then try to match it on a color wheel after a short delay.
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  12 Bayesian reasoning!
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  14 [The answer is always Bayesian reasoning.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QrhAeKBkm2WsdRYao/searching-for-bayes-structure)
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  17 You know where I'm going with this.