Earlier this week, I saw this fascinating movie called 'CTRL' on Netflix. Boy, was my mind blown. Sure, you could say that it was Black-Mirror-inspired. But the way it was adapted for the Indian context was superb. The writing was gripping throughout. The cinematography (mostly using phones or involving laptop screens) was raw and authentic. And the acting was fabulous - I'm a fan of Ananya Panday for her unfiltered and vulnerable portrayal of the young Nella Awasthi.

Catch it if you haven't yet!

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the eighty-fifth 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

Inspiring what Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal did - he went in as a delivery guy to pick up an order at a tony mall and faced the kind of discrimination that delivery partners routinely experience. Goyal was disallowed from using the main entrance. He had to use the stairs and was also not allowed in the food court area till the food was ready.

More leaders should do this.

Ouch. Our politicians seem to love mega road projects. Sure go ahead and build them. But can we also fast-track universal metro+bus coverage in our cities? With functional connectivity between the home and the station?

My kind of a coffee shop. Only missing item? Filter kaapi, darshini style. Swalpa strong.

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. A (non-cringeworthy) Ratan Tata story on LinkedIn by Tony Sebastian

The great Ratan Tata passed away this week (May his soul rest in peace). LinkedIn was inundated with posts - some of which were heartfelt, most of which were cringeworthy. Folks who had nothing to do with Mr. Tata or may not be observing his principle in real life, were seen to be lauding his values and traits.

Amongst the generic slop, here was a message based on a concrete real-life incident, which the writer experienced himself.

b. ''Bollards' and 'superblocks’: how Europe’s cities are turning on the car'

This article was published in Dec-2023, but it is an interesting contrast to the tweet about the Mumbai coastal road.

A city does not need to be adopt a car-first approach. And what's more, it can reverse the inexorable push towards cars and move towards more convenient and eco-friendly options:

A startling statistic emerged in Paris last month: during the morning and evening rush hours, on representative main thoroughfares crisscrossing the French capital, there are now more bicycles than cars – almost half as many again, in fact.

The data point is the latest to comfort Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor, who since she was first elected in 2014 has pursued some of the toughest anti-car policies of any major city – starting with closing the 1970s Right Bank Seine expressway to traffic.

The stats are striking:

...driving within Paris city limits has fallen by about 45% since the early 1990s, while public transport use has risen by 30% and cycle use by about 1,000%.

Not everyone happy though:

“Bike lanes are fine; the mayor’s voters love them,” he said. “But they’re not as effective a means of mass transit as buses, for example, which have been seriously neglected in Paris. And any Parisian will tell you the metro is permanently rammed.”

Hoping and wishing for some positive change in India's cities too over the next few years and decades.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'Where Truth Lies' on the Hidden Brain podcast

In 2016, Prof. Alex Edmans was in a London courtroom, about to testify to the Select Committee on Business about serious corporate governance failures (mainly high CEO pay) by a major British company.

Even as he was furiously going through his notes, he heard another witness from the Trade Union Congress give his testimony. Here's how Prof. Edmans remembers it (emphasis mine):

...what they mentioned was some research which sounded really noteworthy. They said, the lower the pay gap between the CEO and the average employee, the better the company performance. And why did my ears prick up when I heard this? Because this was something I really wanted to be true. It shined with my views on responsible business... this seemed to be music to my ears.

There was only one problem: that conclusion was wrong.

When Prof Edmans looked at the paper online, he found the opposite conclusion - the greater the gap between CEO and worker pay, the better the company performance. What explained the contradiction? A revision in the paper between the draft and final versions:

What I noticed was I was looking at the 2013 version of the paper, but what they quoted in their written evidence was the 2010 version of the paper. And when I looked up the 2010 version of the paper, it indeed had the opposite result than the one they originally quoted. So what had changed between 2010 and 2013 was the manuscript had gone through peer review, where the peer review process forces the authors to correct any mistakes. Once they corrected their mistakes, they found completely the opposite result. Notice that the inquiry was in 2016. So the 2013 paper was already out there for three years.

Here's the surprising part: Despite Prof. Edmans pointing out the error to the court and the committee publishing his correction, the wrong conclusion was not ignored or buried. In fact, it became more popular:

...even though the committee published my supplementary evidence, which suggests they endorsed what I'd written, the final report of the inquiry, which was made after considering all the written submissions, and also the oral evidence in the hearings, still referred to the overturn result as if it was gospel, the idea that lower pay gaps lead to better company performance, and this led to them recommending that all companies disclose their pay gaps, and that recommendation eventually did become law. So this was something with some actual consequences.

Confirmation bias is powerful. If you desperately want something to be true, the, correction your, whole universe conspires to make it true.

The episode shares several other striking examples of this bias in play. And ends with some ideas for dealing with this all-pervasive desire. One idea is the 'Consider the opposite' rule:

So the 'consider the opposite' idea is to try to get around this problem of confirmation bias. So again, what is confirmation bias? We latch on to something uncritically if it confirms what we want to be true, and we reject something out of hand if we don't want it to be true. So why is this interesting? Because what it means is that we are able to show discernment. If there's a study that we don't like, we can come up with a whole host of reasons for why it's unreliable. And so what I'm doing with the Consider the Opposite Rule is to try to activate the discernment that we already have and we use selectively for studies that we don't like, but now apply it to studies that we do like.

Easy to say that... but when every atom of your being wants something to be true, tough to combat that feeling right?

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

Stories about Confirmation Bias (3-2-1 by Story Rules #85)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

The Fascinating Story of Oil (3-2-1 by Story Rules #90)

India's Centre-State Fiscal Schisms (3-2-1 by Story Rules #89)

How to Build Lasting Memories with your Children (3-2-1 by Story Rules #88)