What colour is the pepper on this skewer?

I say yellow. My colleagues said green.

I value open-mindedness, and in similar situations will defer to the group, but this felt like being persuaded to deny my own subjective experience: a tall order for words alone. I couldn't look at the pepper and say "green green green" and see it as any other colour.

I'm nominalist about such things, "yellow" isn't "real" - what's actually happening is we're expressing how we classify things: see ismy.blue. One could argue we just obviously need a third colour (mustard, cyan) in this situation, but that doesn't remove the continuum paradox - imagine the same website but for cyan and blue.

The strong Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is probably not correct, but could a weaker version be at play? I asked my colleagues if they knew what banana peppers were and they said no. Maybe that's why we disagree! My ontology of peppers accommodates yellow peppers already and theirs doesn't.^🫑

Could we have agreed upon a double crux to settle things? I took a photo of the pepper in bright midday sunlight, averaged its colour with bilinear downsampling and then entered the hexcode into various online "colour namers", all of which said variants of yellow/gold/mustard.

Unfortunately, I did this before checking with my colleagues if they thought this was a valid method, and after they'd lost patience with my schtick.

So now I turn to you: what colour do you think this is? Is your answer different from the pepper?^🖥️

Speaking of ontologies…

This is different from the "is my red your red" dilemma, because even if your red quale is my blue quale, we agree that tomatoes are red.

It's closer to the blue dress conundrum^👗, where people were having categorically different perceptual experiences, not just descriptive ones.

This hints at another way to resolve the pepper problem: colour theorists tweaked the photo to make it easier for people to have the alternate experience. Maybe I could do the same with the photo of the pepper? Is this anything?

I don't know. I guess this makes my eyes tingle different, but I'm still not seeing freaking green.

Oh well. As fun as it was to act incredulous and mad about this, I know there's no winning here. The only win is the knowledge that the "colour boundaries are divisive" result easily replicates.