The Kanisza Triangle: Why There’s Much Food in the Tillage of the Poor

Look at the featured image above.

What do you see?

If you’re like most people,  you’d see two triangles planted on top of three circles.

And like most people, you’d be wrong.

As it turns out, there are no circles or triangles in the shape above.

What is perceived as circles are actually three black shapes oriented at different angles.

What is seen as the dark triangle is simply a series of Vs arranged in different ways.

And of course, there is no white triangle at all. You totally made that up on your own!

So, what does this teach us?

People find it easy to remain blind to the obvious.

People looking at the Kanisza Triangle easily see the white triangle that is not even in the picture, yet they miss the Vs that are staring at them.

In the same vein, people look at their environments and only see chaos.

They look at their circumstances and conclude that there’s nothing good that can come out of it.

Yet, right there in the midst of the chaos are opportunities begging to be crystallized.

Little wonder Proverbs 13:23 says, “Much food is in the tillage of the poor…”

The mind hates gaps and when faced with them, will subconsciously create fillers

In the image above, the triangles and circles you saw were not there.

They were creations of your imagination.

In the same way, people have a tendency to make up assumptions about how the world works.

To counter this, you must be humble enough to acknowledge that there will be times when you are working with faulty or incomplete assumptions.

In instances like this, don’t be afraid to reach out and ask for wisdom.

James 1:7 says, ‘If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.’

Conclusion

Order is the inherent nature of the world God created, and there are still obscured patterns waiting to be uncovered.

Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter.”

To see these things, however, you must take a step away from crowd-think and hone your skills of perception.

Things We Do Because of the Difficulty of Thought

Thinking is hard.

As a result, we try to make use of mental shortcuts to make decisions faster.

These shortcuts are called heuristics, and while they are useful, many times, they lead us down rabbit holes.

The other day, I sat close to a dude in a meeting.

As we got talking, I found that he had relatives from the Middle East.

I concluded that he was a foreigner and a student.

Well, it turns out that I was wrong on both counts.

The dude was neither a student, nor a foreigner, and heuristics lost yet another battle.

The one that amuses me the most is the media’s use of statistics.

You hear stuff like, “70% of people who eat ABC will have XYZ in ten years”

What they don’t tell you is the number of people they are basing that statistic on.

70% of 100000 is 70000 and if that’s the case, maybe ABC has the effect they claim it has.

However, 70% of 10 is 7 people!!!

I’m not saying 7 people are not important, but any effects observed in them is likely due to causes other than eating ABC.

But here’s the interesting thing: Researchers almost always tell you all the numbers involved in arriving at their conclusions.

Yet, the media likes to conveniently ignore the details, while focusing on sensationalism.

And because of heuristics, we gobble up anything they place before us – hook, line, and sinker.

So, what’s my point in all these?

Jesus said, ‘…be wise as serpents, and harmless as doves’ (Matthew 10:16).

A good way towards manifesting that wisdom is knowing when you are misperceiving the truth because of an ‘over-reliance’ on heuristics.

I’m not asking you to be over-analytical and critical in every situation.

All I’m telling you to do is to be aware.

It can change your life!

My Reaction to Trevor Noah’s “Why Is the Alt-Right So Angry?”

I’ll be the first to tell you this: I love Trevor Noah and his team.

That said, I still have 3 problems with the video below, which seemed to suggest that the behavior of the alt-right was related to their unwillingness to consume porn.

Confirmation Bias

There are tons of empirical evidence that pornography coupled with masturbation is not healthy. Nowadays, people in their teens and twenties are suffering from premature ejaculation and other forms of erectile dysfunction. To put that into context, before the proliferation of porn on the internet, these kinds of ailments typically happened to men over 40 years. Confirmation bias sets in when you ignore the myriads of evidence against pornography consumption and look for that one person theorizing about how porn is causing the alt-right to be angry. I had the choice to simply watch the video and move on, but I feel there are thousands of people here who are miseducated on the real harm that porn causes in society.

Anybody Can Do Armchair Theorizing

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Dr. David Ley was only providing a theory of how he thought masturbation influenced the behavior of a certain group of people. I do not have any problem with that. I think every good scientist has the right to theorize about anything. That is the way of science. However, science does not start and stop at theorizing. You start with a hypothesis, and you test that hypothesis by experimentation. This does not even have to be a true experiment with real people in a lab. You can go to aggregated data from national surveys such as the BRFSS and many others, and simply compare the reported happiness of people who watch porn and masturbate, versus people who do not. All I am saying is that it is irresponsible to push such a theory without empirical evidence of any form. This is one of the reasons I feel psychology continues to get a bad rep among the hard sciences. You do not see physicists, chemists or biologists theorize and end there. They follow-through by providing empirical evidence that supports or disproves their hypotheses.

Correlation is NOT Causation

One of the first things you learn in grad school is that correlation is not causation. The fact that two events happen concurrently does not mean that one caused the other. You cannot simply say that the alt-right is always angry because they do not watch porn. That’s simply lazy science. As an example, I typically wake up when the sun rises. But I won’t go on to say that sunrise caused me to wakeup. Neither would I say that my waking up caused the sun to rise. There are more factors that directly impact when I get up, such as the time when I slept, or how much I slept the previous night, or how tired I was the previous day. Similarly, there are myriads of factors that directly translate into anger in the alt-right, just in the same way that there are myriads of factors that translate into anger in other people groups.

Conclusion…

Now, I understand this is satire (i.e., Trevor Noah and similar satirists should not be taken very seriously). However, the problem with satire is that you see what you want to see depending on your stand. People on the right would watch this video and laugh at how dumb liberals are to believe that not watching porn can cause anger. People on the left would watch the same video and laugh at how dumb conservatives are to not watch porn. And that’s why I have taken the time to write this long essay, so that irrespective of your leaning, you learn to see through the lenses of objectivity.