Interesting article...and I must admit to getting my ruler out to measure the tables!

The confirmation bias remains very much alive and well! Rhrosty

It would have been better if the tables were actually the same shape. They are not, the angles are different and so one has more area than the other.

The gambler would have won.

Other than that, yes the author has a point and scientists have known this for a very long time, which is why they use a funny little branch of mathematics called statistics.

Oddly enough, the word statistics doesn't appear in the Bible.

knowingly accept the nonsense over the sense.
I don't,
I'm conservative.

I've seldom seen such blithe reductionism as this: "Our brains combine the inputs from our senses to form our views about society, sex, life, the universe, economics, politics, friendship, justice and everything else.", or the rest of the article.

Our senses are nothing without the synthesising brain, which makes sense and nonsense of them all. And the brain's findings are made sense of by the mind--except there is no mind (perhaps). The whole notion of objectifying reality is a nonsense if you think about it. How after all can we be both part and apart from reality? In a position to interrogate it, subject-object? It's an illusion. Or we are truly other; other from the reality that spawned us. I therefore opt for the first option, for I cannot believe that our empiricism can be so eccentric. I don't allude to the tables in the diagram; the inconsistency there is just a matter of perspective, and of course the brain must race ahead of piecemeal apprehensions, or else our anatomical reflexes would be pointless; we'd be trying to avoid the collision long after the event. A batsman doesn't plan his shot after the bowler's delivery; he anticipates.
The brain does a marvellous job of constructing an accurate perception of quotidian reality from the senses, and we shouldn't mock its errors since incoming data is contingent and chaotic, and the objective is to keep us alive, or our stumps in tact, not to afford us a "thoughtful" perspective.
Our thoughtfulness is the delusion, is nothing but an ideological preoccupation--a meditation on our collective meditations.
The point is not to check our beliefs, but to abandon them. Our beliefs/opinions are all derivative and were never based on accurate perception, are not objective. How can we be objective about a game of cricket? We can only be objective "within" the rules of the game. Our opinions are like that. The errata construed from the senses is nothing to the pig-ignorance of ideology.

Bugsy, thanks for your comments. You state confidently (but without proof) that the tabletops are of different shape. They are exactly the same. Perhaps the following helps to convince yourself: cut out a parallelogram that precisely covers one of the tabletops, then cover the other table top with your cut-out. If that doesn’t work for you then you can print the picture and cut out the 2 tabletops and put the two cut-outs on top of each other.