a-c-moore

a-c-moore t1_je83n6m wrote

I love a good spy movie but I feel like spy movies have to walk such a narrow tightrope to be good. If you make them too twisty-turny and hard to follow, audiences will lose track of what's going on, get bored, or feel dumb. If you make them too easier to figure out, they'll seem cliche and audiences will think the movie is dumb. They need to hit that perfect middle ground where the audience can be surprised by the twists, but also understand them.

I feel like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was more of the former. I read the book before seeing it and I still wasn't entirely sure who was who and what was supposed to be happening.

I might just be dumb though.

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a-c-moore t1_jaez1p7 wrote

When I was in high school, I got a D on a test. The way my grades had shaken out, that D would have led to me flunking that class, which would have cascaded into my GPA dropping below a threshold that changed my financial aid status, etc. It could have snowballed into a whole different academic path for me. I disputed one answer the teacher marked wrong, and they agreed with me, which bumped me back up to a C and saved my ass. On the walk home, I thought about it a little longer and realized I had gotten it wrong.

I don't know if the teacher just did me a solid, or if I smooth talked my way into a better grade.

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a-c-moore t1_jaer1bx wrote

It sucks, but it's something you learn to handle better with practice. Being rejected is okay. It doesn't mean you'll always get rejected. It doesn't mean you should be mad at whoever rejected you. It just means you'll get to try again somewhere else again later, which can be exciting in its own way.

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a-c-moore t1_j9rd8g2 wrote

It's interesting to see the journey it has been on.

I first heard about effective altruism years ago when the basic idea was that the most helpful thing you could do was to take a super high paying job, live like a pauper on the lowest budget possible, and donate most of what you earned. The idea was to use hard data related to outcomes to choose the most effective places to donate, rather than just relying on what gave you a warm fuzzy. I thought it was kind of an interesting idea.

Since then it seems like it has become downright cultish. I also saw some EA leader guy talking about how the most effective thing to do with philanthropy money was to give it to rich people because they new how to spend it to create economic activity and jobs, so I guess this snake has now reached all the way around to eat its own tail and we ended up right back at "trickle down" economics somehow.

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