January 9, 2019 at 5:30 pm

Simple Gif Shows How People Can See the Same Thing Entirely Differently

by twistedsifter

 

Check out this gif. It’s simple, it’s beautiful, it’s elegant.

 

simple gif shows how people can see the same thing entirely differently Simple Gif Shows How People Can See the Same Thing Entirely Differently

 

Like life, you can take from it what you want. To me, it shows how people can look at the exact same thing and see different patterns (you see triangles, I see squares) or focus on one aspect that fits their narrative. And before we see the lines drawn and patterns shown, it can easily seem random and arbitrary (maybe it still is?).

Now I can admit that’s all just basic blogger bloviating. If we want to get more scientific, here’s a summary from MIT Research fellow Talia Bronshtein:

 

 
In that same tweet she linked to this article by Denny Borsboom which expands further on these concepts.

Also worth a read is this Vox article, Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong, which is what first led me to this fascinating gif 🙂