A Storytelling Coach More details here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravishankar-iyer/
Gladwell on Disordered Stories (3-2-1 by Story Rules #105)
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After ages, it's been a chill week. Sure there was some travel and some sessions. But finally, the morning exercise routine is back and life seems normal. On Thursday I was invited by the good Deepak Jayaraman for a discussion on his book Play to Potential, organised by ILSS (India Leaders for the Social Sector). Fun conversation! And now, on to the newsletter. Welcome to the hundred and fifth edition of '3-2-1 by Story Rules'. A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:
Let's dive in. 𝕏 3 Tweets of the weekFascinating graph showing the incredible progress made by AI in just 2 years! Scary to think of where things will be in 2026... Yep, and AI is making sure that your self-esteem is held in check... Biotech is like - why should AI grab all the headlines? Hopefully this brings us closer to the end goal in the fight against cancer. 📄 2 Articles of the weeka. David Perell on writing with AI David Perell is a writing coach and founder of the (now discontinued) course 'Write of Passage'. He also runs the 'How I Write' podcast. In this long post on Twitter, Perell shares his thoughts on writing with AI. He acknowledges that the threat seems existential for writers like him: This AI boom has set off an existential crisis in me.
Some background: I’ve been teaching writing for the past six years. In that time, I developed frameworks for how to write well and a reputation as a good teacher to learn from. Partially because of the AI wave, I decided to stop teaching.
LLMs are fast approaching expert levels in all fields: The amount of expertise required to out-do an LLM is rising fast. For example, the quality of a well-prompted, ChatGPT Deep Research report is already higher than what I can produce in a day's worth of work on almost any subject. So how do we stand out? By becoming more human (authentic) in our writing: What kinds of non-fiction writing will continue to last? Here’s a heuristic: The more a piece of writing comes from personal experience, the less it’s likely to be overtaken by AI. Personal writing, like biographies and memoirs, aren’t going away anytime soon. That's because people have data about their lives that LLMs don’t have.
Having a unique perspective helps too. This is Peter Thiel's famous interview question: "What very important truth do few people agree with you on?” If you have an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world, you don't have much to worry about.
The common thread here is humanity. People are also interested in people. Their stories, their struggles, their emotions, their drama, their unique insights into how the world works.
Do you think that in the future, AI would even be able to read our thoughts (maybe using implantable devices) and directly convert our deepest thoughts, memories and feelings into the right words? We live in crazy times to even entertain that thought. This article gives us hope that we can have clean air in India again - hopefully not too far out into the future. Hannah shares some striking charts which show how people in UK today are breathing much cleaner air as compared to their parents and grandparents This is seemingly the standard process - as countries grow richer, they see a rise in pollution: If you look at it over time, you find that air pollution tends to follow a very standard pattern as countries develop and get richer. It’s roughly as you see in the charts: an upside-down U. Outdoor pollution starts low, then climbs as countries burn more fossil fuels for energy and industrialize their economies. Eventually, this reaches a turning point, and emissions fall. But we cannot take the same time that the western countries took to clean up their air: The problem is that this process took a long time: centuries, in fact. If it takes the rest of the world just as long, billions of people will be exposed to high levels of air pollution for most of their lives. Hundreds of millions will die prematurely due to air pollution. Hannah says that it does not have to be this way. Today, we have better technologies and a much better understanding of how to tackle air pollution than we did 50 or 100 years ago. This means people around the world can accelerate this process if they put the right policies and interventions in place. In the rest of the piece she focuses on two pollutants - Sulfur dioxide and Nitrogen oxides - and how countries brought down their levels through a combination of regulation and green-tech. One worrying chart in the article was this one - even China has reduced sulfur dioxide emissions (despite increasing coal production) - but India's emissions have seen a continuing increase. 🎧 1 long-form listen of the weekI've recently come across this podcast ('In Good Company' by Norwegian hedge fund manager Nicolai Tangen) - and the guest roster is impressive! This conversation with the always-interesting Malcolm Gladwell starts off in a contrarian way. Tangen starts with a simple question: What are the most important things which have changed in society over the last 25 years? Gladwell's response? To turn that question on its head and look at what has NOT changed in 25 years: I would turn the question on its head and which is I think we spend a lot of time talking about the things that change and too little time talking about things that haven't changed. You know we've seen this sort of advent of this avalanche of new technology and I'm always deeply impressed by how little technology changes the way we function as human beings we seem to be and how we're always left at the end of the day with some fairly difficult and intractable human problems while technology sails ahead and deals with ever more sophisticated problems. You know, it always comes back to the same thing which is can we can human beings find a way to cooperate with each other in an efficient and functional way and that's been the problem for thousands of years and it doesn't seem to get any easier despite the fact that we're surrounded with ever more sophisticated tools for trying to make that happen... Sometimes I meet with companies and I ask them what kind of problems do you have and they all talk about you know well we're trying to to build down the silos we're trying to get cooperation up, we're trying to get people to share, trust each other more, feel safer and so on.. seems like it's the same problem everywhere and been the same problem. I'm sure had you at the conversation 50 years ago you would have heard a version of the same thing. Gladwell then makes a fascinating point about a deep fundamental change in western societies that most of us do not give enough importance to: demography. ...the single most I think issue change in the western developed world is demographic. It is the aging of the population which I think impacts the way in which all kinds of other technological innovations are used. So that you know we are profoundly older than we were 50 years ago had AI come along 50 years ago I think he would have seen a very very different pattern of adoption than you would see now. So if you go back to to the beginning of the baby boom where you have across the West an extraordinarily large generation of people entering professions for the first time um and that was a when those moments happen those demographic moments you have an opportunity to change the patterns of practice because patterns of practice in any domain are obviously heavily kind of specific to generations. We don't have that now so instead of having a new generation embracing a technology and bringing it to the profession, we're faced with a task of converting existing professional domains to new habits of practice. That's not impossible it's just harder. So you think when we get older we're a bit beyond repair... not beyond repair, I just think making an argument to a 55-year-old doctor that they should seed some enormous share of their diagnostic behavior to AI is so much harder than it is if you're telling it to someone who's in medical school. This is such a powerful insight. By that logic younger countries like India should find it easier to change patterns of practice... Another point Gladwell makes is the power of the disordered story: ...unconsciously I am drawn I'm looking for lessons about how to tell uh complicated stories which is how to order (the information). The definition of a good spine novel or a good mystery is it is an exercise in disordered information flow. If I'm talking to you about an event that happened yesterday (say) the fall of Syria.... I (could) say Syria fell yesterday (and) Assad's in Moscow and then we proceed to talk about why right... (But) if I was writing a thriller about it I'd flip it. I would withhold the fact that Syria fell yesterday and Assad's in Moscow and we would start at the beginning and at the end the big surprise would be the whole thing falls apart and Assad's in Moscow right that's disordered information. The efficient way to talk about a story is the first way. The fun way is the second way. So I'm in the fun business. I'm in the disordered information (business). Now disordered information stories are really much harder to tell. Every child knows how to tell an orderly story. But a good disordered story is like... there are only at any given time in the world of literature what 50 people who can tell a good one I mean it's an astonishing small (number) And yes, in my upcoming book (have I mentioned that before?) there is a chapter on how to control the release of information using some of these techniques. One of the examples in the chapter is from, surprise, surprise, Malcolm Gladwell. That's all from this week's edition. Ravi PS: If you found this thought-provoking or useful, please consider forwarding it to a friend or colleague. And if you got this email as a forward, you can get your own copy here. Access this email on a browser or share this email on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, or Twitter. You can access the archive of previous newsletter posts here. You are getting this email as a part of the 3-2-1 by Story Rules Newsletter. To get your own copy, sign up here. |
Ravishankar Iyer
A Storytelling Coach More details here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravishankar-iyer/
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