This week was special - we had the first edition of our Pune Knowledge on Tap talk series on the evening of 27th March.

Prof. Pradeep Apte of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics regaled an audience of about 60 listeners with fascinating tales about the history of alcohol brewing - including many examples from ancient Indian history!

Audience waiting in anticipaton for the talk to start!

Our next talk is by biologist Dr. Siddhesh Kamat and slated to be held on 24th April (tentatively the last Thursday of every month). Looking forward to that one too!

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the one hundred and ninth edition of '3-2-1 by Story Rules'.

A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:

3 tweets
2 articles, and
1 long-form content piece

Let's dive in.

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

For a change, this one comes from LinkedIn! Found a rare profound one-liner.

Haha, would be fun to get Adrien Baillet to experience the present-day world!

I'm not old. I'm seasoned.

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. David Perell on Writing with AI (post on X)

Writing coach David Perell distils his thoughts on writing with AI and makes some good points.

He describes the 'personality' of each LLM:

What are the different models like? ChatGPT is your friend who makes a lot of good points, but it’s kinda boring, Claude is your hippie friend who loves to get vulnerable but takes the whole “express yourself” thing a little too far, and Grok is your unhinged friend who leans a little too hard into tinfoil hat theories, but is always a trip to jam on ideas with.

Do you have a contrarian point of view on something? It would distinguish you from AI:

Humans will contribute with unique data or perspectives. The famous Peter Thiel interview question doubles as a good writing prompt: “What very important truth do few people agree with you on?”

For me the truth is this: I think most organisational review meetings are broken and need to move to become narrative-driven.

Here are the three levels of review meetings, as I see it:

Vibe/opinion driven: Data is incidental. People express and defend views using anecdotes and strong opinions.
Data-driven: "In God we trust. All others must bring data." - sounds impressive. But meetings quickly become data dumps. Senior leaders are left to decipher the story through layers of complex data.
Narrative-driven: The presenter analyses and understands the data and crafts a clear and comprehensive narrative. That narrative would be presented in visual slide-docs. Ideally the audience spends 10 mins silently reading the document before opening things up for discussion. (Yes, I know, Amazon already does this with their 'six-page narratives'. It's a great practice, but one that requires a higher-order skill of writing word-document narratives. I believe that visual slide-docs can also do the same job, making it easier for both the writer and reader)

Perell makes an important point of how we are ok with AI-made music (as long as we don't know it was AI-made, presumably), but not with AI playing chess:

Thought experiment: Will AI-writing be more like music or chess? With music, we don't care how a song is made. We just want it to be good. With chess, there's a huge market for watching human beings play even though the computers are already better. I think non-fiction writing will go the way of music. People won’t care how it was made. They’ll just care that it’s good.

b. 'Tyler Cowen, the man who wants to know everything' by the 1843 Magazine (Economist)

This is a fascinating portrait of economist and infovore Tyler Cowen. He seems to be a true polymath:

Cowen is famous not for a single theory but for the broad scope of his intellect. Put simply, he seems to know something about everything: machine learning, Icelandic sagas and where to eat in Bergen, Norway. “You can have a specific and detailed discussion with him about 17th-century Irish economic thinkers, or trends in African music, or the history of nominal GDP targeting,” said Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, an online-payments company. “I don’t know anyone who can engage in so many domains at the depth that he does.”

Cowen seems to enjoy learning stuff for learning's sake - not for any practical utility:

He has been researching, unpaid, for decades, at a rate that would put most people in hospital. “Treat Tyler like a really good GPT,” one friend of Cowen’s advised me, in a tone that lacked any trace of irony. The rise of AIs that seem to know everything and think intelligently only sharpens the philosophical question at the core of Cowen’s life: what is knowing things actually for?

“I don’t over-analyse it,” Cowen said to me, when we spoke about this. “I once said to my wife – and this was a joke – but I said something like, ‘I’m not very interested in the meaning of life, but I’m very interested in collecting information on what other people think is the meaning of life.’ And it’s not entirely a joke.”

His rate of reading is insane (emphasis mine):

Cowen calls himself “hyperlexic”. On a good day, he claims to read four or five books. Secretly, I timed him at 30 seconds per page reading a dense tract by Martin Luther. Later, I sat next to him while he went through an economics paper. He read it at the speed of someone checking that the pages were correctly ordered.

He uses his influence and reach to fund promising ventures - what differentiates is his speed of granting the funds:

He has dispensed millions of dollars through a grant programme known as Emergent Ventures (EV), which is designed to get money as quickly as possible to young, talented people. Applicants send Cowen a description of their plan; he invites some for an interview; if he likes their idea, they get the funds they need within a few days. This may not seem like anything new, but in the funding world EV is revolutionary. A grant from Horizon Europe, a prestigious funding programme run by the European Union, takes 273 days to come through from the close of applications.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'What Indian Army, Mukesh Ambani, Adani and Mahindra can teach you about leadership?' Capt Raghu Raman

This is the first time I am listening to Capt. Raghu Raman, and I came away mighty impressed with his storytelling skills. Analogies, anecdotes, norm-variance... he is really good!

In this conversation with Ganesh Prasad of the Think School, Capt. Raman shares his thoughts on leadership and success.

I loved this analogy of trigonometry as mental push-ups:

...when I was in school when you were in school... must have wondered why the f*** am I learning trigonometry and calculus? Have you ever used calculus in your life or trigonometry for that matter? But that's a bit like doing push-ups. It doesn't matter what sport you're playing. I may be a basketballer or I may be a footballer or you know table tennis player, and my coach makes me do push-ups... When you learn trigonometry you are mentally exercising those synapses which are problem-solving synapses...

One lesson that corporate and non-profit organisations can learn from the Army is the importance of training:

...so in the Army training is equated with an Army Commander, so it's an operational command - that is the importance given to training. Second I think they have institutionalized it in a very structured manner the training doesn't really begin in IMA or NDA or OTA. It begins in Sainik schools, it begins in NCC. There are many many feeder institutions which are feeding towards this organization called the Indian army.

Capt. Raman asks organisations to give more importance to their L&D functions:

So the first structural (question is) that where have you positioned L&OD (Learning and Organisational Development)? In all corporates L&OD is subservient to HR... where actually L&OD should be having a seat at the high table.

And exhorts that training and trainers be given more time and importance, just like in the Armed forces:

...In a typical 20y year career a officer will spend close to 10 years in training

...if you wear an instructor badge in the Army (or Navy and Air Force, it) is considered to be a Holy Grail right... unlike many other organizations including government organizations, where if you're in the training academy you're supposed to be a person who lost out the race, who didn't get an operational command

Clearly, though, corporates are very different from the Armed Forces. In the Army, pay is guaranteed and tenure is a given. But in corporates where everyone needs to contribute towards earning and where job security is not certain, it is not possible to give this level of importance to training. Having said that, there is an argument to be made to increase the importance given to learning.

Capt. Raman makes the case for 'sweating' during peacetime and going through the right safety processes even when it may be inconvenient:

...it's much much better to make your troops sweat in peace than bleed in war. So it's a bit like, I don't know if you like to ride motorcycles. I do a lot of riding. So the clothing while riding is ... extremely uncomfortable because, first it's heavy, second it's hot. But you never wear riding clothes to ride, you wear riding clothes to fall. So you may not have fallen for like a thousand kilometers but you can't take off your jacket.

A good storyteller can explain things on a whiteboard without the use of a laptop:

Very often when somebody will come and give me a dump of a presentation or something like that, I say, "samjha de mujhe, whiteboard mein samjha" (explain it to me on a whiteboard)... because only a person who knows it can do it. A person who got the presentation made by somebody else cannot do it. That's point number one. Point number two for me, learning is easier if somebody just explains it on a whiteboard by drawing up the map rather than showing a map to me and then explaining the features. I'm not able to take that data in one go. I'd rather that it's constructed in front of me

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

How the Indian Army prioritises Training (3-2-1 by Story Rules #109)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

Writing as the Ultimate Brain-Gym (3-2-1 by Story Rules #108)

Tyler Cowen on using AI in Writing (3-2-1 by Story Rules #107)

Better questions = Better Conversations (3-2-1 by Story Rules #106)