This is a long essay; there's a lot of really good and a lot of not so great.
One might compare the first century of Christianity, where the only way to increase the number of adherents was to personally convince each one to make a commitment which would potentially be costly to them; and the situation a few centuries later, where Christianity offered opportunities of riches and power to those who accepted it, and many of those with power succumbed to the temptation to increase the number of the faithful at the point of a sword -- although of course, all that can be imposed is compliance with certain kinds of external behavior, not an actual change of heart.
The thing about BLM and Me Too is that these things are still problems. Black people are still disproportionately killed by police officers, and it's very difficult to hold them to account. One powerful person was found by a jury, who had examined evidence which the accused person had every opportunity to rebut, to have sexually assaulted a woman; after that he was elected president of the United States.
When the only way to make people more aware of these problems ("woke") was to personally convince each person to make a commitment which would be personally costly to them, things were fine. But as Paul points out, at some point getting on the "woke" bandwagon offered opportunities for riches and power; and it became a temptation to short-cut the process of transformation with threats of punishment, rather than changing people's minds individually.
I mean, yeah, the ideological madness that refuses to have reasoned discussions, and attempts to enforce the latest complex orthodoxy (chosen by a few without the proper level of reasoned debate) with the threat of punishment rather than convincing each person one by one, needs to die. But if the result is that people in power are still not held responsible for their actions, then I think we will have lost something important.
EDIT: One thing I've tried to do when possible is to point out that bullying people into silence won't change their mind. Obviously it takes the right kind of person to hear this, but it has at least a few times seemed to help someone begining to go "woke" wake up to what it is they're actually doing.
> If you grew up in certain communities or religious groups, standard playing cards were forbidden items because of their association with gambling.
I was told it was because the face cards were derived from Tarot cards. Playing Uno or Rook (which had only numbers on their cards) at functions was considered just fine -- although of course any poker chips would have been so obviously Right Out that nobody even thought to ask.
(FYI later on I looked it up and the face cards do not derive from Tarot cards; but these discussions happened before the World Wide Web.)
So first of all, I absolutely agree that it's an important concept: to me the idea is one of imitating externally observable behavior, patterns, what-not, without any understanding of what's going on underneath. Unlike what the author says, "cargo cult science" certainly can get some sorts of results; particularly when the desired results are actually things like "grant money".
> We’re not catering to imaginary offenses somebody hallucinates on behalf of some supposedly marginalized people anymore.
I'm still processing the information from the blog somewhat; but at the moment, for me, it doesn't come down so much to the idea that these people may be offended, but that it defames them. The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like, and reinforces a skewed and arrogant idea about how much better / scientific / whatever the rest of us are. These skewed views hurt both us and the cultists.
It may be, like the "frog slowly boiling" myth, that it's the sort of thing you repeat even knowing that it's not something that actually happens.
Or maybe we need to come up with a different name for it -- although it's not as easy to come up with a picture that's as evocative as the pop culture version of the cargo cult.
> The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like, and reinforces a skewed and arrogant idea about how much better / scientific / whatever the rest of us are.
This is precisely what GP is talking about. It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive. You are imagining defamation on behalf of them.
The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened. Taking a humble approach, we may be in the same position when it comes to things we, from the height of our reason, do not understand as well.
> The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand
How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?
> It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive.
Primitive doesn't mean stupid. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Jared Diamond said that nearly all the tribal peoples he met when doing fieldwork were seemed to be, on average, more intelligent, engaged, curious, and knowledgable than the average Westerner. (In his follow-up book, "The World Until Yesterday", he attempts to capture some potential wisdom that tribal peoples have that he thinks modern society may have lost.)
It's this confusion between "primitive" and "stupid" that is exactly the harm that he cargo cult story creates and perpetuates.
Which is why I used the word primitive, and not the word stupid. If you are making this confusion, that is on you. The "cargo cult" terminology does not imply stupidity. It implies, at most, ignorance.
Also, the tale may be apocryphal, but apocryphal tales (such as fairy tales) still can contain interesting insights about how humans behave. Maybe that's why they propagate through time.
> Also, the tale may be apocryphal, but apocryphal tales (such as fairy tales) still can contain interesting insights about how humans behave. Maybe that's why they propagate through time.
But do you make it clear to those you tell the cargo cult story that it is supposed to be apocryphal?
Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?
> Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?
This happens all the time, and it’s fine? A recent front page example [0] — did julius ever exist? Who knows. Would it change anything? Not really…
A problem could definitely arise if you specifically called out a coworker without anonymization, but speaking in broad strokes is… perfectly fine and uneventful
I don't think that example illustrates what the GP was arguing against. Julius is presumably not a real person, but is an amalgamation of behaviors made by real people. The author of that post may not have even ever known anyone names "Julius".
GP was talking about intentionally making up stories about real people, using their real names, and telling those stories to others who might actually even know the person in the false stories.
But that’s not really descriptive of anything discussed, is it? The cargo cult story names no names, and talks about a general group (south sea islanders). Calling out a specific individual raises a swath of other issues, but even that’s fairly commonly done with little issue for famous people… and it’s fine — especially when they’re famous & dead
> Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?
Yes, you actually can do this, and if those stories do reflect actual human nature that other people also observe then they will be shared and spread. If they warn of potential problems that really do sometimes happen and allow other people to avoid those problems then they will be useful, even if they were made up!
Yes, I would say you have a very different opinion on slander and defamation from me and also from all of the western legal tradition.
You're going to have a bad time when you learn just how much of fiction is loosely based on / exaggerations / distortions of people and events that the author knew or experienced.
And, yes, if it helps, you have my permission to tell your junior engineers how ol' imgabe, in his hubris, once deleted the master database and was chained to a rock by the gods to have his liver pecked out by eagles for all eternity.
> Yes, I would say you have a very different opinion on slander and defamation from me and also from all of the western legal tradition.
I think you're misunderstanding what the GP was talking about.
If we worked together at a company, and I went to a bunch of junior new hires and said (falsely), "hey, let me tell you about the time imgabe deleted the production database, causing a week-long outage that lost us 20 of our customers", that would absolutely be defamation. That could even be legally actionable if you could prove that story was causing you harm (like perhaps clueless management heard and believed the story, and you were then passed up for promotion or a raise). Not saying that it would be easy to do so, but I personally think you'd be justified in being upset that someone made up a story like that about you. I have a reasonably thick skin, but I certainly wouldn't be pleased that a made-up story like that about me was circulating about me.
And even if you seriously wouldn't care about someone making up a story like that about you and using it as an object lesson at your workplace, assuming that no one would ever be offended or upset about that is... well, kinda shitty.
That is a tortured interpretation of what is happening here, though. Cargo cults did happen. And some of them did in fact operate in the way explained in the stories.
The point of the story is not to gloat and say "hahaha these stupid islanders are so dumb and we're so smart". The point is to illustrate a particular type of error and to make people aware that we, too, can make that very same error. That we are not, in fact, better and smarter, but rather the same and just as susceptible to the same errors.
The reason we use the story with the cargo cults is because the error is much easier to see from the other side, where you understand how the system actually works and you know why the things the islanders are doing won't actually result in any planes arriving. The point is that sometimes you are on the side the islanders are on where you are not understanding how the system works and you need to recognize that and work on understanding it and not just mindlessly imitating something.
This is obvious to anyone who is not walking around desperately searching for something to feel offended about.
OK, point taken; we tell the Emperor's New Clothes even though it never happened.
On the other hand, nobody thinks it actually did happen: it's understood to be ridiculously exaggerated to make a point. And there's not a specific named group of people who are implied to have actually been gullible enough to fall for the trick.
I find the actual cargo cult beliefs -- "our ancestors are sending us loads of cargo which the white people are stealing from us" -- in a way far more disturbing in a "teach us something about human psychology" way. Compare to, "There is loads of prosperity available, which {the government, the capitalists, immigrants} are stealing from us."
There are plenty of similar stories about real people though, that aren't true, but we tell them to make a point anyway.
I'm sure there's lots of people who believe Einstein flunked grade school math even though he didn't. The point is more important though - flunking grade school math is not the end of the world and you can still be successful in life. Einstein's reputation is relatively unharmed by this fabrication.
I still think it's important that people understand what actually happens.
FWIW, as a reasonably clever person (a paper I wrote in the course of my PhD got an ACM Hall of Fame award) who regularly got failing grades until I got into high school, I think that story about Einstein, if I heard it, only did me harm. I started putting in effort in high school sort of on accident. I wish someone would have kicked me in the ass much sooner, told me that nobody cares how smart you are if you don't get the job done, and that I'd better figure out how to make things happen or I'd be a wanna-be loser.
OTOH, it's said that people with dyslexia or other neurodivergences which cause them to struggle in school often make good entrepreneurs -- they're used to dealing with failure and used to working around their limitations to get things done.
Indeed, that's the point I was making earlier. It's one thing to tell an apocryphal story to illustrate something we already know to be true, and another to base our "truths" on made up stories.
Do humans ever get overconfident and slack off and lose to opponents who work more diligently? Why, yes, humans do do that and that’s what the story is about.
I think maybe you don’t understand fables, or possibly stories in general.
This is a disingenuous reply. If you tell a story about a human group, and base your ideas of how humans behave based on that, it better be true. Otherwise we can base policy on all kinds of exotic stories that never happened.
It did happen for one thing, and for another such stories, even when fictitious, are crafted to illuminate a human behavior that does happen, even if that particular story did not literally happen. See, for example, all of literature.
The premise of the article is not at all that cargo cults never happened. Instead, the article acknowledges that cargo cults happened, but claims they are misunderstood and often ill-documented, and therefore unsuitable for software metaphors.
The "never happened" claim is waaaay stronger and likely no credible or serious observer would make the "never happened" claim.
So what? If the argument is "ok, cargo cults did happen, but the reality of them has nothing to do with how we use 'cargo cult' as a poor software development metaphor, but we're still going to use it that way anyway"... that... seems worse, actually?
I think it's kinda shitty to make up a pejorative story about a group of people to describe a bad practice. But it seems really dumb to take a real story about that group of people, and then completely misinterpret it (intentionally or otherwise) and use it in a way that makes no sense.
Tangentially, Yali, the New Guinea politician whose question set Diamond on the path to writing Guns, Germs, and Steel, was involved in cargo cultism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yali_(politician)
> How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?
I am sympathetic to this argument as I despise Lord of the Flies and always believed it was unrealistic, and was gratified recently to find that a similar real-life situation did occur and it did not turn out like the book at all.
However, in this case it did happen and that fact is seemingly not in dispute, as the article here uncritically quotes several sources describing cargo cult behavior matching Feynman's story almost exactly (Time Magazine and National Geographic). The main argument of this article seems to be that while there have been a couple of cases like this, there is a larger category of cargo cults which generally have other features and more complexity, though they are no less deluded overall. This argument falls flat for me. I don't see why this should be fatal to the metaphor.
The point is that the islanders were not mistaking effect for cause, but simply believing some wrong things.
For example, they were clearing the airstrips, not because they believed that doing so caused the cargo to appear, but simply to facilitate the delivery of the cargo if and when it came.
This is false. The quoted National Geographic article explicitly claims that they built airstrips and radio towers to attract cargo. Time Magazine, too, claims that they believed their rituals would cause the cargo to be delivered.
I'm not saying every cargo cult worked this way. I'm saying cargo cults that worked this way did exist according to the very sources quoted by the article, which it does not dispute.
I’m entertained at the notion of Diamond’s book refuting an idea popularized by Feynman. I’m convinced that they both make shit up. Feynman’s book wasn’t written by Feynman, but by a guy who heard Feynman’s stories years before, and Diamond’s book Guns Germs and Steel references many “facts” with zero citations that on further inspection turn out to be unsupported. Bullshit artist vs bullshit artist, basically.
> How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?
The same way fables and other fictional stories do. They contain an idea and communicate that idea to the listener. They deliberately pull away from the real world which is full of nuance and unnecessary details and present a story that contains the essence of the idea they're trying to convey to help make it clear.
Nobody believes that a goose that lays golden eggs exists, but they still get the idea that excessive greed can carry negative consequences from the fable. And they share that story as something they can refer to to express that notion. Feynman's story of the cargo cults is a fable just as well as Aesop's goose that laid the golden egg.
> It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive.
Perhaps not, but it is certainly defamation to ascribe specific pejorative acts to people when they never actually acted in that way.
> The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened.
I feel like we can do this in a way that doesn't create a false narrative about an entire group or class of people, no?
And regardless of that, how can a story describe human behavior if the story doesn't describe behavior that actually happened?
> it is certainly defamation to ascribe specific pejorative acts to people when they never actually acted in that way
Except nothing in the cargo cult story is pejorative?
I mean, is it pejorative that ancient people worshipped the Sun as a God for bringing light and warmth to the world, not understanding what the Sun actually is? Religions were developed following that belief too.
I fail to see how it defames anything. Maybe the prejudice is in the eye of the observer in this case. Your disrespect for more primitive cultures makes you think their presumed behavior is detrimental to their intelligence.
> false narrative about an entire group or class of people, no?
First of all, it is not entirely clear that the story never happened. The accounts of cargo cults are disputed. I am simply giving it the benefit of doubt that the story may be apocryphal.
Second, the story does not paint a false narrative of anything. It just describes primitive cultures as primitive. Being primitive is not pejorative, it is merely descriptive. If you think it is pejorative, I suggest you spend some time reflecting on your prejudices.
> And regardless of that, how can a story describe human behavior if the story doesn't describe behavior that actually happened?
Have you ever read any fairy tale or old folktales? "The boy that called wolf"? "The emperor's new clothes"?
Perhaps you did not know, but those stories are fiction. Fictional stories can still contain allegories and insights on human behavior.
A weird notion, I know. The world is full of things like that.
No, fictional stories can not tell us something new about human behavior. yes, they can illustrate behavior we already know happens, but we need to be careful not to base any new understanding of human behavior on stories that did not happen.
Otherwise, then I guess we can stop studying psychology/sociology/anthropology/etc. and instead resort to making up stories all day to fill in what we do not know.
> The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened.
Also important, cargo cult mentality implies a inversion of cause and effect and a baseless and unsubstantiated assumption that correlated but irrelevant aspects are actually the root cause of a phenomenon. Such as building runways in the middle of nothing expecting that to be the trigger to have cargo dropped at your feet.
> Taking a humble approach, we may be in the same position when it
comes to things we, from the height of our reason, do not understand
as well.
Isn't that the main point of that cargo-cult metaphor as used today -
a restatement of Arthur C Clarke's technology and magic remark and how
we've let our own magic exceed our reason... that we're no longer at
the "height" of reason at all?
> it doesn't come down so much to the idea that these people may be offended, but that it defames them. The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like
This doesn’t matter. Nobody is talking about the actual cultists. It’s a metaphor to talk about how people right now, in our own society behave around certain topics. The story behind it is apocryphal.
I dont really get the defamation angle. It seems like the practices where still very strange and performative. They seem to argue that it was more frequently about radios and boats than airplanes. Is that that more offensive or hurtful?
I think the core of the metaphor is still there, that a practice can pass into lore and performance, severed from their logic and context.
> So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.
(note no mention of fake airplanes)
And here are historical instances from the actual article:
> They hacked airstrips in the rain forest, but no planes came.
...
> They created mock radio antennas of bamboo and rope to receive news of the millennium.
...
> The leader remains in communication with John Frum through a tall pole said to be a radio mast, and an unseen radio. (The "radio" consisted of an old woman with electrical wire wrapper around her waist, who would speak gibberish in a trance.)
That looks to me like cargo cult in the pop culture sense.
At some point the fake airplane illustrations were inaccurately tacked on, but if anything they give the cults too much credit because they depict high-quality replicas.
It's far easier to say yes to something else than to say no to something that is working.
Give an example of a term we can use instead that is more accurate and useful, and you won't need a wall of words to try and fail to convince people to change.
Are there still modern software using the floppy disk icon for save? I can't recall any.
In my experience most software that still use an icon for saving these days are using an arrow pointing down to a horizontal line. This icon is usually similar or exactly the same as a download icon.
I'm learning New Testament Greek on my own*, and sometimes I paste a snippet in to Claude Sonnet and ask questions about the language (or occasionally the interpretation); I usually say it's from the New Testament but don't bother with the reference. Probably around half the time, the opening line of the response is, "This verse is <reference>, and...". The reference is almost always accurate.
So the theory behind Guided Immersion is that you shouldn't need most of that. When Priscilla and Aquilla were learning Greek, nobody sat them down and said, "Now definite articles are inflected according to gender, number, and case: ho, hoi, ..." They were just given example after example, and the language processing unit of their brains figured it out.
So Guided Immersion tries to just give you not only vocab, but grammar in such a way that there's always only a handful of concepts you haven't mastered.
I developed Guided Immersion to help myself master Mandarin, actually; I used Anki with Mandarin for probably 8 years before developing Guided Immersion; once I switched I never went back. Then about a year and a half ago ago I ported it over to Koine Greek not knowing any Greek, and started using it myself after watching a handful of YouTube Videos introducing the characters and the basic cases.
Maybe it's just the way my brain works, but I can't imagine sitting down and trying to memorize all those endings, particularly for the verbs.
I have now bought Mounce's "Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar", and "The Morphology of Biblical Greek", to help me refine the "language schema" the algorithm uses. I appreciate the work Mounce has done to find the deeper morphological rules which make sense of what look like "irregular" inflections; teaching the algorithm about those will certainly help it to present things in a more useful way to learners. But I don't think trying to grind through all that in your conscious mind is the way to go.
Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek and the workbook were good enough that I stopped watching the lectures. The workbook is excellent. Can't recommend it enough.
2. One state allows gambling and its neighbor doesn't: Gamblers in the non-gambling state use websites / travel to locations in the gambling state, spending massive amounts of money there. Both states experience the negative side effects of gambling, but the one that allows gambling gets a huge tax influx, and the one that forbids gambling loses tax revenue.
3. All states allow gambling: No state has a tax advantage, but all states have the negative externalities of gambling.
Individual states probably don't have the authority, and certainly not the clout, to do much about their citizens going to the neighboring state to gamble. The federal government used to have the authority, and certainly does have the clout, to make a dent in inter-country gambling.
The federal government still has the authority to regulate/ban gambling transactions that cross state lines (including online). Needing to cross state lines also creates a large barrier for lots of people vs. having it on your phone.
you are forgetting that gambling is an addiction… crossing state lines for gamblers is not a large barrier much like it isn’t for sexual predator and other deviants/addicts.
It is a huge barrier for someone like a college student that doesn't have a car, or if they did they'd have to drive for hours. They'll never have an opportunity to get started. It's wildly different from Disney (or their university) advertising sports betting during games and having them download an app.
I am thinking based on reading your words that you are upstanding citizen who was raised well and never fell into an addiction trap.
but trust me, for people with addiction traveling 1000 miles without a car is a non-issue (speaking from quite personal experiences). some stuff might slow you down but not prevent you from reaching a goal and quenching your thirst
The point is that vastly fewer people will become addicts in the first place if you don't literally advertise it during games and let them download an app and get going in a couple seconds. Stopping 100% of addicts isn't the goal. The goal is to discourage it, or at least not encourage it.
We don't need cartoons pushing cigarettes on kids, and rightly banned that. We don't need Disney and schools pushing gambling on young adults. The current situation is that some public schools are literally pushing gambling on students. It's a complete betrayal toward the younger generation by the older ones (yes, state lotteries are also bad).
I dont disagree at all - I think gambling should be outright illegal. there are hordes of “fans” of all sports in america that watch the sport only in the interest of gambling and nothing else. the last superbowl I was at a party and was asked in disbelief many times how come I don’t have any “action” on the game so much so that it made me feel like I am somehow “weird” … just take football for example, games are 3+ minutes long, there is on average 11-ish minutes of actual gameplay, the commentators are paid more than maybe handful of players on the field… no wonder one needs gambling to keep money machine churning
Did he "struggle with time", or did he just work harder to find the move a chess engine would choose?
Basically in every single stat, Ding plays more like the chess engines; and overall he was able to capitalize better on an advantage and recover better from a disadvantage than Gukesh. Just looking at the data, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that Gukesh won mostly by luck: that the more probable outcome was that Ding didn't blunder in the final game.
On the other hand, Ding isn't a chess engine; he takes longer and gets tired sooner than a chess engine. One aspect of human chess is management of both time and intellectual energy, so there's certainly an argument to be made that the extra effort Ding put in to play more like a chess engine wasn't the optimal strategy for a human.
I think this misses the forest for the trees. At the end of the day, if you're competing to be the world champion in chess, your goal isn't to play as close to the engine as possible, it's to win games. If you play with 100% accuracy, but lose on time, you don't get to be the champion.
You're discounting the fact that Gukesh could have also sacrificed good time management and spent more compute time on his moves for precision. The fact that he didn't do that doesn't mean he won on luck.
I've got a counter-flow heat exchanger, but it looks like they're using a different design:
> Each OpenERV TW4 module has a very quiet pair of fans, pointed in opposite directions, and a heat exchanger in a 6 inch pipe, that goes through a wall. The hot, polluted air from inside goes out for 30 seconds, and the heat from it is stored in the heat exchanger.
> Then, the fan reverses direction, moving clean air from outdoors to the indoors. On it's way in, it picks up that heat from the heat exchanger. This type of heat exchanger is called a regenerative heat exchanger, or less commonly, a regenerator. The kind shown in the video is a recuperative type, not regenerative. Recuperative types are what most people think of, consisting of a thin layer of material that separates two gas streams. Regenerative heat exchangers are different. They briefly store the energy while air flows in one direction, then release it when the air flow reverses.
> The OpenERV TW4 modules are made to always work in pairs. One always sucks air while the other blows air, synchronized over WiFi. This should be done, or hot air would be pushed out from the building through the walls during the ingress phase, causing heat loss.
One might compare the first century of Christianity, where the only way to increase the number of adherents was to personally convince each one to make a commitment which would potentially be costly to them; and the situation a few centuries later, where Christianity offered opportunities of riches and power to those who accepted it, and many of those with power succumbed to the temptation to increase the number of the faithful at the point of a sword -- although of course, all that can be imposed is compliance with certain kinds of external behavior, not an actual change of heart.
The thing about BLM and Me Too is that these things are still problems. Black people are still disproportionately killed by police officers, and it's very difficult to hold them to account. One powerful person was found by a jury, who had examined evidence which the accused person had every opportunity to rebut, to have sexually assaulted a woman; after that he was elected president of the United States.
When the only way to make people more aware of these problems ("woke") was to personally convince each person to make a commitment which would be personally costly to them, things were fine. But as Paul points out, at some point getting on the "woke" bandwagon offered opportunities for riches and power; and it became a temptation to short-cut the process of transformation with threats of punishment, rather than changing people's minds individually.
I mean, yeah, the ideological madness that refuses to have reasoned discussions, and attempts to enforce the latest complex orthodoxy (chosen by a few without the proper level of reasoned debate) with the threat of punishment rather than convincing each person one by one, needs to die. But if the result is that people in power are still not held responsible for their actions, then I think we will have lost something important.
EDIT: One thing I've tried to do when possible is to point out that bullying people into silence won't change their mind. Obviously it takes the right kind of person to hear this, but it has at least a few times seemed to help someone begining to go "woke" wake up to what it is they're actually doing.
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