The claw

Have you ever been to an arcade or a restaurant that had one of those claw and crane skill machine games? If you haven't it is basically a big box with glass sides that is filled with some sort of small prizes, things like stuffed animals or cheap watches.

What happens is you put money into the machine and then you aim the claw part directly over the prize that you want and press the button that makes the claw drop down  and close over your intended prize. And then if you are really really really lucky when the claw comes back up it picks up the prize and drops it into the part of the machine that makes it accessible to you.

I bring this up because I was watching Toy Story with my son today, for what feels like the seven hundred and ninety millionth time, and there is a sequence in the movie where Buzz and Woody end up inside one of those machines. The prizes inside that machine are all identical three eyed aliens that have absolutely no idea what the outside world is like. They have taken a look at what is around them and with their limited knowledge have made up a whole bunch of things that they think to be true.

In their eyes the claw is effectively a god that they show a great deal of admiration for. After all, the claw chooses who stays inside and who gets to leave, or so they believe. They also believe that once one is chosen it is their destiny to leave the machine and move on to a better place.

The one alien that they show getting chosen in the movie ends up as a chew toy for a rather vicious dog. So much for the whole better place thing. And since he never gets to go back to the alien collective they still believe their pretty lie.

What does this have to do with real life? Well, many people when left with a limited amount of information do the same thing. They come up with a story that they want to be true. And because there is no immediate way of showing that story to be false they decide it is true. But it isn't. And once people make these decisions they base other often important life decisions on top of these things, creating a completely skewed vision of the world. Or they decide that they are willing to fight to the death to uphold their belief, even though it is false.

There is nothing wrong with coming up with theories to explain the world around you. The danger comes when we just decide that we know those theories to be true without any evidence. Things like, the world is flat or the sun is the center of the universe. We make these decisions and then close our minds to any other possibility being true.

What we ought to instead do, is come up with the best theory we can with all of the available data and continually test to see if it is true. We should tell ourselves that we want it to be true, but that it might not be. We can believe it is true as long as we are open to the idea of changing our belief once sufficient evidence is provided.