What color is Lowd?

A recent cognitive science experiment asked people about their association of abstract concepts and colors: What color is anger? What color is math? What color is gricker? (a made up word) What color is loud?

The same questions were also posed to large language models (LLMs). The goal of this research is to understand whether interpreting color requires embodied sensory experience or if it's just a matter of statistical patterns learned from language.

In short, statistical inference gets you surprisingly far in teaching machines how abstract concepts are related to colors (e.g. anger = red). But the statistical approach is limited when a machine encounters something truly novel or highly abstract (e.g. made up words, or an ineffable woman named Julia).

With these results, one could argue that embodied experience remains a unique aspect of human cognition. It is what allows us to relate to one another culturally and aesthetically in ways that transcend learned patterns from language.

If you occupy a certain corner of the internet that cares about studies like this you could not escape the question "What color is loud?" over the past month. And that is how we got here. We occupy a corner of the internet that wants to share our embodied experience of this delightful human being named Julia Lowd.

So the ask is abstract but it is also simple: What color is Lowd?

Click the link below - choose a color that represents your particular experience of Julia Lowd and add a birthday message. You can also check back here and see how much we all agree.