A conflict of Stories

Aditya Singh Rathore

April 9, 2019

Abstract
In this paper I will be talking about ”Indo-Pak Conflict of 2019”.
There have been conflicts between India and Pakistan before , even four
wars. There have been many conflicts around the world.
But this particular conflict was unprecedented . And this is because
of participation of ”the Commons”. Earlier conflicts were limited to
and controlled by Armed forces and diplomacy with public opinion coming
in the form of political leadership.
This time what we saw was extensive participation of public and media
from both sides and it even became ugly.
In this paper , I will try to critically analyze the participation of
media in this conflict and draw a parallel with Allegory of the Cave.
The analysis also includes comment on usage of social media during the
scene. Here , I will modify Pluto’s Allegory of the Cave to fit in my idea.
The paper will also briefly comment upon how ethnocentric belives were
shattered this time.
One major conclusion that I drew from this project is that media
feeds on cognitive biases. This paper extensively uses the idea. One
of the main challege that i felt while carrying out this analysis was presence
of my own cognitive biases. I always thought that I am not biased(
which is a bias in itself - blind spot bias) but I was proven wrong.
For example it was very easy for me to get carried away in the spirit
of Nationalism. But as a critical thinking ,it would have been a bane for
me.

1 Allegory of The Cave

Allegory of the cave was writtern thousands of years ago , but it seems more
relevant than ever.The shadows cast on the walls of the cave represent the super-
ficial truth, which is an illusion that the prisoners see in the cave. The people
who were casting shadows are influential people. Following sections describe
who is casting shadow and how. The third section adding more to Plato’s cave:

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1.1 Mass Media
In this case , Media is casting ”the shadows”. The media is telling us superficial
truth. For example , from the conflict , if we see news headlines from the next
morning after the strikes , we notice two conflicting claims :

The Dawn reported : ”Indian Aircraft violates LOC, scramble back

after PAF’s timely response : ISPR” (also ”claimed” by DG-ISPR Pak-
istan).[2][4]

Times Now had following clippings : ”India Strikes back” , ”200-300 Jaish
terrorists killed” , ”Indian Avenging Force”[3]

Who is telling the truth ? How can we comment ? I immediately try to use
de Bono’s white hat. But this attempt is futile because none of the above
comments is based on ”real facts”. Though , they have tried to show facts
supporting their claim , Pakistan’s govt. tried to show images of the claimed
site showcasing that only plants were destroyed , but again this claim cannot
be believed because when media approached the site , they were not granted
access to every location. Indian side claims to have an evidence , but it is not
yet shared with the public.
Apart from that there were debate shows in which the news anchors were
completely biased. Naming two channels , Times Now and Republic , hosted
prime time TV shows in which the anchors were more like war mongerers. Same
was the scene across the border.
But why I consider it wrong is that all these debate shows were publi-
cized. The TV companies wave advertised these shows to gain more viewership.

One reason why a lot of people believed what media of their side was claiming
is because of Anchoring bias that we have. It was the first piece of information
recieved.
Another bias that supported the spread of above news is Availability
Heuristic Bias. Was this the only big news of the day ?

What people often forget is that armies are not machines that you ”switch
on” and it starts killin. Armies are made up of Men. Armies are made up of
brothers , sons, fathers , husbands.

News agencies are supposed to be our eyes and ears to the unreachable world.
But , What if these are faulty ? We see something that is not real. Here , we
see Plato’s cave coming to life.
This was just an example.

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1.2 Politicians
One thing that many people noticed was that many politicians tried to gain a
lot from these conflicts on both sides of fence.
As mentioned earlier , this time these politicians had a very powerful tool ,
twitter. The government of Pakistan was constantly trying to put India down
by regular updates from twitter handle of DG-ISPR. The ministers of both
government were using twitter to constanly ”threaten” peace.
Further we could see that many politicians claimed this act would win some-
body extra seats at coming elections. We could see politicians from both sides
of the country extensively use pre-emptive intelligence based surgical strikes in
their election rallies.

Certainly someone tried to show us some shadow.

1.3 Social Media

Pluto’s cave has a slight modification. That is with social media. Accord-
ing to the story , cavemen are shown a reality which is projected by influential
, superficial reality. This was the case with mass media. But this is not the
case with social media. I would like to present a slight modification to
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave :

Suppose that in Pluto’s cave the men have clay with them. Now , what-
ever is being projected on the walls is seen by those men. Along with naming
things , the men try to model what they see and also share it with
others. Others , if they find the work interesting , they share it furher or they
try to remodel the model. Now this caveman , who modeled it inititally , has
become a new ”influencer”. And in our case many more grow.

After a lot of shares , the model which the original man modified is likely to
be distorted. But the original model is also not the true mode. It is based on
distorted shadow of an object. The object is a copy of real object. So the end
product is a distorted copy of a distorted copy of a ........copy.

And in this whole process , many influenster grow , who have disctorted copy
of a distorted copy of a distorted copy of .......... true knowledge.

This type of cave makes Pluto’s cave more interesting. Many cavemen think
that they have true knowledge as they are creators of something and hence ,
makes it unlikely that many people would go outside to get real knowledge.
Their would be stronger and hence , difficult to uncondition.

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2 People and their beliefs
Fake news has always existed and humans have always fallen for it. In our
scenario it just that , such a news could reach everybody faster than at any
point in the history. It could be generated faster than at any point in the
history.
”In his excellent analysis, Buzzfeed’s Craig Silverman showed that the top
20 fake news stories generated more clicks than the top 20 stories from every
major publication combined during the 2016 US-election cycle. And not only
do we click on fake news stories, but we believe them 75 percent of the time.”[1]

2.1 Ethnocentrism
It is somewhat difficult for us to recognize that the value which we attribute to
our own civilization is due to the fact that we participate in this civilization,
and that it has been controlling all our actions from the time of our birth; but
it is certainly conceivable that there may be other civilizations, based perhaps
on different traditions and on a different equilibrium of emotion and reason,
which are of no less value than ours, although it may be impossible for us
to appreciate their values without having grown up under their influence.[5]

An unprecedentend event also happened this time. This is concerning Wing

Commander Abhinandan- A national hero (my Indian speaking). Pakistan’s
army is judged ” cruel ” by a lot of Indians. They have this preconcieved no-
tion about them.(Your writer is guilty of the same).They would torture our boy!
This was the cry after Abhinandan was captured by Pakistan’s army.

But Pakistan’s army proved that ethnocentrism is just a phenomenon ,

there is no truth to it. Wing commander was rescued by Pakistan’s army from
the angry crowd. He was not physically tortured. They treated him just the
way we want our army to treat their soldier and within days , he was released
as a peace gesture.
His release was certainly a peace gesture respected by many. Though some
media tried to rephrase it like this : ”Pakistan scared of India.” or ”Pakistan
scolded by USA.” But even my Indian ignored it. They tried to influence some
people trying to use Selective Perception Bias.
I was impressed by this act of Pakistan.

2.2 Modern Algorithms

Though I have talked about Social media above , I would like to throw some
light on modern Algorithms they employ and how it supports a cognitive bias İn
particularly I would like to talk about the new techniques of Machine Learn-
ing.
What it does is that it shows you results based on your previous interest and
searches ,through some complicated mathematics. For exapmle , if you search

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”shoes” , in future you will see advertisements based on ”shoes”. How is it
harmful then ? If you like one page , say ”anti-Pak civil army” , in future you
will recieve more links to similar groups.
What it does is that it encourages Confirmation Bias. You are recieveing
what you want to recieve ! And this recieved information confirms your beliefs.
You may not know , but this idea in sense , made the matters worse as people
believed what the read more and more.

References
[1] Cognitive Bias of The Day
http://cognitivebiasoftheday.com/
[2] Major General Asfi Ghafoor
https://twitter.com/officialdgispr?lang=en

[3] The Times of India

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
[4] The Dawn
https://www.dawn.com/

[5] Franz Boas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism