My understanding is that Sapir-Whorf is not nearly as strongly favored as it was at one point, though?
And I see nothing wrong with saying something doesn't make sense. If anything, I find the idea that we shouldn't allow folks to express doubts on things as a terrible path to go down. I am emphatically not claiming that, because it doesn't make sense to me, it must be false.
In my post, do you have a counter to why I would not be able to distinguish two colors that I use the same name for? It is not at all uncommon to where mismatching clothes that are both blue, as it were. If asked to say what color someone's clothes are that are cyan and blue, I fully expect I'd just say "blue." As would the vast majority of people.
If that example bothers you, what color would you say the sky is? Noting that it typically has strong gradients that are clearly visible to people.
Strong Sapir-Whorf is a nutcase opinion, weak Sapir-Whorf is so completely accepted that it is considered boring. And it does not claim that they can't perceive differences; they are less likely to perceive and remember the differences, which are more easily filtered out. Similar to the claims that babies stop differentiating between sounds that are not semantically distinct in their own language, which is also uncontroversial.
You very emphatically did say that it was wrong, and justified it with your dislike and incomprehension of it. Specifically, "I really dislike the idea .. [it] seems distinctly wrong to me. ... it doesn't make sense to me..."
It's strange that you pick this example of the color blue, because that happens to be a well known example of the topic - "if two colors are called by the same name in a language, speakers of that language will judge the two colors to be more similar and will be more likely to confuse them in memory compared with people whose language assigns different names to the two colors." If you were Russian, then you would have to choose between two words that both correspond to the English word "blue". If they were two different blue colors, and you were asked if they were the same color, then statistically you (an English speaker) would say that the clothes are the same color, and the Russian speaker would disagree. If a third item was shown that matched only one of the two, the Russian would be slightly faster and use less cognitive processing to identify the match. When later asked about the clothes, the Russian would probably remember the difference in colors more distinctly than you. None of this means that you can't distinguish the two colors, but they do mean that the linguistic categories you use have influenced your thought.
The quote I used was from the story. And I said it "seems distinctly wrong to me." If you are pushing that the accepted idea is more nuanced, I'm open to that. If you say that I am just wrong, I'm also open to that. As it is, it seems hard for me to take from the lead in on this article.
I'll note that later quotes at least took it in a much softer interpretation. “We can categorize without language, but the speed and the efficiency with which we categorize can be boosted” is far different from the article's, "As a result, they see colors in the world in slightly a different way."
That is, it seems far easier to accept that they categorize the world in a different way. But just because I said there are some birds in the yard, doesn't mean that I can't see the difference between jays, woodpeckers, and my chickens. Heck, just because I don't know the breed names of my chickens doesn't mean that I can't tell I have several breeds. If I say I have a collection of fowl, that doesn't mean I don't understand I have ducks and chickens. (Similarly, if I have some ducks, that doesn't mean I don't know the difference between drakes and ducks.)
Your last paragraph really takes this to the much softer "we remember based on our vocabulary." And, that doesn't seem nearly as controversial. Again, though, the article had "they see colors in the world in slightly a different way." Which, yeah, I still feel is very wrong. Your memory is not necessarily how you experience and see things. It is more how you encoded them into your memory.
And I see nothing wrong with saying something doesn't make sense. If anything, I find the idea that we shouldn't allow folks to express doubts on things as a terrible path to go down. I am emphatically not claiming that, because it doesn't make sense to me, it must be false.
In my post, do you have a counter to why I would not be able to distinguish two colors that I use the same name for? It is not at all uncommon to where mismatching clothes that are both blue, as it were. If asked to say what color someone's clothes are that are cyan and blue, I fully expect I'd just say "blue." As would the vast majority of people.
If that example bothers you, what color would you say the sky is? Noting that it typically has strong gradients that are clearly visible to people.