Alright, you probably have seen this. It's a diagram that is supposed to show the primary colours, and also which ones have clear contrast:
This is absolutely terrible, and I'm astonished we teach this to out children. Heck, it goes worse than that. We tell kids this pack of lies, then give them everything they need to prove it wrong and just handwave away when reality doesn't match this delusion. No, the mix of yellow/red/blue isn't just dark brown because I didn't mix it correctly, that's just what this sham of a system produces. This awful chart says a lot about how we think about our children's education.
If I wanted to, I could decry this piece of junk as discriminatory. It clearly shows red and green as opposites, implying that they have a lot of contrast between them. In reality, many people find that pair specifically hard to distinguish. As bad as that is, I don't need to virtue signal to point out any of the other flaws in this.
Not only are they using an inferior system, they aren't even getting their "primary" colours correct. They just stole two of the actual primary colours to give themselves a fake veneer of legitimacy. They knew that Cyan and Magenta are obviously not terms we have evolved to apply to primary colours, so they substituted them out for Red and Blue. Now Cyan I could live with being primary, many cultures had only one term for both blue and green because life is bad at making blue. But the designers must have known how illegitimate magenta is to sweep its founding presence under the rug. How illegitimate is magenta? Look at this:
This is all the colours we can see. Notice something? Magenta isn't here. It doesn't exist. It's completely imaginary. Magenta is just your brain failing to understand what red and blue without green is like. There's no way a model would be accepted if something that artificial was at its foundation, so the model was just disconnected from reality and allowed to continue its course. We have printers in every house nowadays that use the actual main colours of pigment, but this delusion continues.
Let's get back to contrast. You might be asking "how do 2/3 of the pairs actually contrast correctly if the entire setup is fake?" It's just smoke and mirrors, like everything else here. It's not related to how colours mix at all. Half of the colours (the "warm" ones, because it's not like higher frequency means more energy or anything like that) are simply brighter than the other half. Go back to the diagram, and look at how it's 255 red but only 175 green, and how it uses the much deeper violet over the actual mix of red and blue. We had a better system for contrast based on brightness back in the middle ages: you could contrast any colour with 2 or more full (actual) primary colours present with any colour that had 1 or less. Admittedly, they lacked the technology to make effective cyan or magenta pigments, so they just had white and yellow in the 2+ category. I'm just going to state this again: our system to recognize contrasting colours has regressed since the 1400s.
I hate this stupid circle so much.
