Alright, the book's final manuscript has been sent, warts and all, to the publisher! Wish me luck for the next phase of the process.

As a celebration (not that I needed a reason), I am attending an event called IPA Diwas on the 22nd of March. It is exactly as it sounds - a meetup where many microbreweries in Pune will showcase their IPAs. 15 breweries. 22 IPAs. One happy customer.

Cannot wait!

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the hundred and eighth 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

That is a profound thought, expressed simply!

SpaceX is seriously impressive. Also great visualisation.

Great way to make the numbers relatable. Instead of just showing the progress over years, they used familiar markers of time.

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'Jupiterian heft' by Mukul Kesavan

Sure, England was not exactly the epitome of grace and modesty during their time as the Lords of Cricket. But does BCCI have to engage in brazen power displays, asks Mukul Kesavan.

He agrees that in the recently concluded Champions Trophy the cricket was superb, and the Indian team a deserved winner:

The saving grace of the Champions Trophy was that the Indian team would have probably won the tournament without the luxury of chilling in Dubai while other sides travelled between venues as economy class teams tend to do. Rohit Sharma pulled off the front foot, Varun Chakravarthy kept alive the heterodox wrist-spin pioneered by Bhagwat Chandrasekhar and Anil Kumble, Virat Kohli revelled in his best format, Hardik Pandya loped about like a limited-overs-Lindwall, and together they made the game seem easy.

But he does point out to the brazen power display by the BCCI and differentiates between being a hegemon and nakedly abusing your power:

Hegemony consists of making other people do what you want them to, voluntarily. It’s different from the bald exercise of power where clients are nakedly coerced. It’s the difference between Donald Trump rubbing the noses of America’s allies in the dirt to bring home to them their status as clients as opposed to Europe’s post-War leaders enthusiastically hailing America as the leader of the free world of their own accord.

He ends with a cautionary warning: India should not throw its weight around so much that young promising athletes in competing countries (especially the SENA nations) choose other sports over cricket:

The BCCI might want to remember that globally cricket is a small sport. In the major cricketing nations outside South Asia, it is one sport amongst many, competing for eyeballs with football, rugby, Australian rules football and tennis. To remain a credible international sport, cricket needs the semblance of a level playing field.

b. 'Why reindustrialization in the US is hard' by Balaji Srinivasan (Tweet thread)

The powers that be in the US have decided that they have outsourced manufacturing for too long and now need to get some of it back. Ergo, big tariff walls.

Thing is, it's not so easy to do that, says Balaji S and makes some compelling points on why it is difficult for rich developed countries to re-industrialize:

Basically, mining and manufacturing were tough jobs that are now romanticized in the abstract but that can be difficult to recruit for in the concrete, especially if the resulting product needs to compete with China in a global market on price.

Your people need to work really hard, really smart, and really cost-effectively to compete. That is tough.

In this follow-up tweet, he addresses the question that manufacturing has become much safer now (I liked the thesis-antithesis-synthesis framework):

(1) Thesis: physical jobs have higher rates of pollution and industrial accidents than keyboard jobs.

(2) Antithesis: but they've gotten safer over the years, due to regulations, process innovations, and technology!

(3) Synthesis: true, but they still produce more pollution and industrial accidents than keyboard jobs, by a factor of 10-20X in the latter case.

He gives a tough message - you can't have it all. There are real tradeoffs:

It does mean acknowledging tradeoffs.

For example: - If you don’t automate, these jobs are tough - But if you do automate, there aren’t many jobs at all

Or: - If you want high pay, you need high (vocational) skill - But if you don’t have high skill, it’s years to add skill

Or: - If you want high pay, you need to be globally exceptional - But if your product isn’t globally exceptional, you can’t sustain high pay

You basically can’t have it all — lots of jobs AND no pollution AND no industrial accidents AND no need for new skills AND work hours stay the same AND keep the reserve currency AND you don’t need allies AND it’s all done in one day via tariffs AND China just goes away AND everything just goes back the way it was.

📖 1 long-form read of the week

a. 'Avoiding the Automation of your Heart' Gurwinder Bhogal in conversation with Freya India

In this deep conversation, Gurwinder and Freya India (both online writers) discuss some philosophical questions of humanity's ability to think and decide for ourselves in the AI age.

Freya raises a critical concern - we are outsourcing a core ability:

My main concern isn’t so much losing human creativity or everyone having AI girlfriends, but that someday we won’t trust ourselves at all. I see a future where young people won’t trust any instinct they have without checking with ChatGPT first. Where they will ask AI to solve relationship problems, to calculate who is right in an argument, to make decisions for them instead of going with their gut. I genuinely believe people are already doing this, outsourcing not only their ability to write or work, but to decide, to act.

Gurwinder makes an interesting parallel with the invention of... writing!

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates worried that the invention of writing would cost us our memory and wisdom, because the ability to record knowledge on parchment would keep us from storing it in our heads. It may be true that writing has made us dependent on writing, but it also gave us the printing press, the internet, search engines, CTRL+F, and many other superpowers. So, overall, writing took a little of our agency, and gave us so much more.

And then responds with a provocative point - those with more agency will get more:

The question is, will AI turn out the same way? Will the agency it gives outweigh the agency it takes?

I’d say it depends how much agency one already has, because agency typically can’t be given; it must be grown...

I therefore see AI as a personality amplifier; it will give more agency to those who already have it, and take more from those who already lack it.

Gurwinder has a key insight - we are constantly trying to conserve precious thinking resources:

So how do we maximise our agency? We must first consider why we give it away in the first place. The reason is phronemophobia: humans are naturally averse to thinking.

In 2014, researchers at Harvard and the University of Virginia conducted experiments in which they left participants in a room with nothing to do except think or give themselves electric shocks. After just a few minutes, many participants began to give themselves the shocks. They preferred being zapped to thinking.

We’re configured to avoid thinking because cognition eats up a lot of time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources. As such, the brain is not so much a thinking machine as a machine that tries to circumvent thinking—it is calibrated to ration rationality. (This is why even the smartest people are dumb most of the time.)

This part below is so true:

The side-effect of this aversion to thinking is that people don’t want to be left alone with their thoughts. They’ll spend hours doomscrolling news of horrific tragedies rather than introspect. As Carl Jung wrote, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

Gurwinder's recommended solution - to treat writing as a mental gym:

When the Industrial Revolution made it possible to live lives without physical exertion, going to the gym became necessary to stay fit. Equally, now that the AI Revolution has made it possible to live without mental exertion, we need the mental equivalent of gyms to stay sharp.

For me, the best brain-gym is writing—it forces you to shut out distractions and listen to your thoughts. A particularly useful form of writing is journaling, where you basically keep a diary in which you routinely interrogate yourself.

And he ends his answer with a lovely callback reference to Socrates!

Write, even though machines can write for you, because the purpose of writing is not just to produce writing, but to distil your thoughts, refine your beliefs, and maintain your agency.

If Socrates had only spent more time with his pen and parchment, perhaps he would’ve realised that the thing he feared would cost us all our agency might ultimately be the thing that saves it.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

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

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

📖 1 long-form read of the week

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What Bali can Teach the World (3-2-1 by Story Rules #112)

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