I think a lot of people have heard so much about internalized prejudice and bias that they think they should ignore any bad vibes they get about a person that they can’t rationally explain.

But if a person gives you a bad feeling, don’t ignore that.

Both I and several others who I know have generally come to regret it if they’ve gotten a bad feeling about somebody and ignored it or rationalized it away.

I’m not saying to endorse prejudice. But my experience is that many types of prejudice feel more obvious. If someone has an accent that I associate with something negative, it’s usually pretty obvious to me that it’s their accent that I’m reacting to.

Of course, not everyone has the level of reflectivity to make that distinction. But if you have thoughts like “this person gives me a bad vibe but maybe that’s just my internalized prejudice and I should ignore it”, then you probably have enough metacognition to also notice if there’s any clear trait you’re prejudiced about, and whether you would feel the same way about other people with that trait.

Naturally, “don’t ignore the bad feeling” also doesn’t mean “actively shun and be a jerk toward them”. If they’re a coworker and you need to collaborate with them, then sure, do what’s expected of you. And sometimes people do get a bad first impression of someone that then gets better – if the bad feeling naturally melts away on its own, that’s fine.

But if you’re currently getting a bad feeling about someone and they make a bid for something on top of normal interactionlike if they ask you out or to join a new business venture or if you’re just considering sharing something private with themyou might want to avoid that.

I don’t have any rigorous principled argument for this, other than just the empirical personal observation that ignoring the feeling usually seems to be a mistake.

Consider reversing this advice in the case where you tend to easily get a bad vibe from everyone. Anni Kanniainen comments:

I struggle with trauma-related trust issues, so sometimes I might get bad vibes merely due to my own withdrawn nature in the situation or the fact that I expect the worst from a situation — i.e. meeting with a lady during a weekend out and finding later that she’s approached me with a voice message, so I assume she’s yelling at me about something I had done wrong.

That being said, I think there is a genuine bad vibe you may sometimes get — and often it’s a calmer and more rational one that you would get with a gut-punch of anxiety. You notice it best by observing how an individual talks or behaves in a social context or by interpreting their current actions through the information you’ve already acquired.

This approach tends to work, but sometimes entertaining your intuitions only make the anxiety bigger.

As an another point in the opposite direction, I do also endorse the adage of trust beyond reason, as defined in that link – as long as you don’t get a bad vibe.

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But if you’re currently getting a bad feeling about someone and they make a bid for something on top of normal interaction… like if they ask you out or to join a new business venture or if you’re just considering sharing something private with them… you might want to avoid that.

In such cases, it seems to me that a good policy is to act in such a way that your actions are robust against vibe quality. For example:

  • If someone asks you to join a new business venture, verify that they are reliable by asking around, check their track record of past ventures, don’t invest anything you can’t afford to lose, etc.
  • If someone asks you out (and you find them attractive or are otherwise inclined to accept; otherwise, vibes don’t matter, you just say “no thanks”), stick to public spaces for a first date, do a web search for the person’s name, establish boundaries and stick to them, be prepared with concrete plans to react to signs of danger, etc.
  • If you’re considering sharing something private with someone you don’t know well, don’t.

These approaches work well with people you get bad vibes from and also with people you get good vibes from.

In short: trust, but verify.

I think  this approach is reasonable for things where failure is low stakes. But I really think it makes sense to be extremely conservative about who you start businesses with. Your ability to verify things is limited, and there may still be information in vibes even after updating on the results of all feasible efforts to verify someone's trustworthiness. 

But I really think it makes sense to be extremely conservative about who you start businesses with.

Yes, you should check carefully.

To put it another way: sure, use all the information you have access to (so long as you have good reason to believe that it is reliable, and not misleading)… but adopt a strategy that would still work well even if you ignored “vibes”.

I'm surprised to see this take so disagree-voted, given how sensible the policy of adopting a vibes-invariant strategy is. Anyone who disagree-voted care to explain?

If the strategy is vibes-invariant, it's also ignoring useful information. It's not sensible to use an X-invariant strategy unless you believe X carries no information whatsoever. And that's kind of what the OP is arguing, that vibes do carry information. If you disagree with that, argue that directly! Arguing that you can adopt an invariant strategy without tossing away information is not correct or useful. 

It’s not sensible to use an X-invariant strategy unless you believe X carries no information whatsoever.

This is not the case. It is sufficient for the X input channel to be very noisy, biased, or both, or for mistakes in measurement of X to be asymmetrically costly.

Separately, you may note that I did not, in fact, argue for a “vibes-invariant strategy”; that was @Mo Putera’s gloss, which I do not endorse. What I wrote was:

a good policy is to act in such a way that your actions are robust against vibe quality

and:

sure, use all the information you have access to (so long as you have good reason to believe that it is reliable, and not misleading)… but adopt a strategy that would still work well even if you ignored “vibes”

This is explicitly not an argument that you should “toss away information”.

You're right, I mis-paraphrased. Thanks for the correction Said.

If the strategy is vibes-invariant, it's also ignoring useful information.

I am not one to suggest ignoring useful information if you're able to process it in order to get a better answer. However, I think all the examples above were examples where people do not expect to be acting more effectively after processing the information.

That is, I agree with you for a perfect Bayesian that you shouldn't ignore anything ever, but I read Said Achmiz as saying "If you get bad vibes from someone, be safer around them through planning", which is not actually a qualitative difference from what Kaj Sotala suggested.

Let's apply some data to this!

I've been in two high-stakes bad-vibe situations. (In one of them, someone else initially got the bad vibes, but I know enough details to comment on it.) In both cases, asking around would have revealed the issue. However, in both cases the people who knew the problematic person well, had either a good impression of them, or a very bad impression of them. Because there's a pattern where someone who's problematic in some way is also charismatic, or good at making up for it in other ways, etc. So my very rough model of these situations is that there were a bunch of people you could have asked about them and gotten "looks fine" with 60% probability or "stay the fuck away" with 40% probability. If you have only have a few data points of this variety, you'd want to trust your vibes because false negatives can be very costly.

stick to public spaces for a first date, do a web search for the person’s name, establish boundaries and stick to them, be prepared with concrete plans to react to signs of danger, etc.

These mitigations would do nothing against a lot of real relationship failures. Imagine that everything goes swimmingly for the first year. Then you start to realize that even though everything your partner has been doing makes sense on the surface, if you step back and look at the big picture their actions tend to have the effect of separating you from your friends and blaming yourself for a lot of things, and it just doesn't seem healthy. When you finally decide to break up, it's an extremely painful process because: (i) your partner is better at weaving stories than you, and from their perspective you're the problematic person (ii) your friends all know your partner, and they've made a good impression, (iii) you will continue to see them at social events, and (iv) even after all of this, you don't think they ever purposefully acted maliciously toward you.

These mitigations would do nothing against a lot of real relationship failures. Imagine that everything goes swimmingly for the first year.

OP talked about someone asking you on a date. The suggested strategy was about mitigating problems that might be encountered when going on a date.

An analogous strategy for a long-term relationship might be something like “establish boundaries, ensure that the relationship does not crowd out contact with your friends, regularly check in with friends/family, talk to trusted confidantes about problems in the relationship to get a third-party opinion”, etc.

“This solution to problem X doesn’t also solve problem Y” is not a strike against said solution.

P.S.: The anecdotes are useful, but “data” is one thing they definitely aren’t.

I’m not saying to endorse prejudice. But my experience is that many types of prejudice feel more obvious. If someone has an accent that I associate with something negative, it’s usually pretty obvious to me that it’s their accent that I’m reacting to.

Of course, not everyone has the level of reflectivity to make that distinction. But if you have thoughts like “this person gives me a bad vibe but maybe that’s just my internalized prejudice and I should ignore it”, then you probably have enough metacognition to also notice if there’s any clear trait you’re prejudiced about, and whether you would feel the same way about other people with that trait.

 

It seems like the most common situation when you'd ignore bad vibes would be when a trait like this confuses your signals. When you identify a negative trait that "feels more obvious", especially if it's socially taboo to be prejudiced against (race, ethnicity/accent, LGBT-status, mental/physical disability), this can interfere with your ability to correctly interpret other evidence (including "vibes"), so that it's very easy to overcompensate the other way. 

The classic example from women's self-defence classes: you enter an enclosed space (e.g. a lift) with a man of a particular ethnicity who makes you instantly nervous. You consider not getting in, but then think "oh, this must just be his ethnicity I'm reacting to", castigate yourself for your prejudice, ignore the bad vibes, get in any way, and it turns out he was dodgy. 

Or a neuro-atypical colleague suggests a small business venture in a manner that would normally raise red flags. You get "bad vibes", but you interpret this as irrational prejudice against autistic behaviour traits, so you go along with it despite your vibes. Only later do you realise that your red flags were real, and your correction for prejudice was adding unnecessary noise into your decision-making.

I don't know whether there's evidence to back this up, but my sense is that "correction for potential prejudice" would be the major source of error here, especially among people who are more reflective.

Yeah, agree. Not sure what to do about that.

Solution seems obvious: do not attempt to correct for potential prejudice.

If you consider the prejudice itself to be a problem (and that’s a reasonable view), then work to eliminate the prejudice. (The best and most reliable way is to get to know more people of the given category.) But regardless of whether you have already succeeded in this, don’t override your judgment (whether based on “vibes” or on anything else) on the basis of “well I have a prejudice that might be contributing to this”.

I mean, the problem of "my brain gets bad vibes too easily" is more general. Prejudice is a very common manifestation of it, but it's something that can happen in other ways, and in the limit, as mentioned, you get bad vibes from everyone because you're just paranoid and it isolates you. I think this is more an issue of you trying to get a sense of how good your intuition is in the first place, and possibly examine it to move those intuitive vibes to the conscious level. Like for example there are certain patterns in speech and attitude that scream "fake" to me, but it feels like I could at least try describing them.

Curated. This is a generally important point, which I've also learned this the hard way. And I like how Kaj includes two important caveats while making it (i.e. some advice on distinguishing prejudice from bad vibes, and what sorts of people should maybe consider the opposite advice)

This is a good idea usually, but critically important when using skills like those described in Listening to Wisdom, in a therapeutic relationship (including many forms of coaching), or while under the influence of substances that increase your rate of cognitive change and lower barriers to information inflow (such as psychedelics).

If you're opening yourself up to receive the content of those vibes on an emotional/embodied/deep way, and those vibes are bad, this can be toxic to an extent you will not be expecting (even if you try to account for this warning).

Do not do mind meld-like techniques/drugs/therapy with people your system is throwing unexplained warnings around. Instead, step out of the situation and investigate any such warnings at a safe distance, with the possibility of a "nope" and disengaging if the warning is still flashing (even if you don't get clarity on it's source).

There's a version of this that's directional advice: if you get a "bad vibe" from someone, how strongly should this influence your actions towards them? Like all directional advice, whether it's correct or incorrect depends on your starting point. Too little influence, and you'll find yourself surrounded by bad characters; too much, and you'll find yourself in a conformism bubble. The details of what does and doesn't trigger your "bad vibe" feeling matters a lot; the better calibrated it is, the more you should trust it.

There's a slightly more nuanced version, which is if you get a "bad vibe" from someone, do you promote it to attention and think explicitly about what it might mean, and how do you relate to those thoughts?

I think for many people, that kind of explicit thinking is somewhat hazardous, because it allows red flags to be explained away in ways that they shouldn't be. To take a comically exaggerated example that nevertheless literally happened: There was someone who described themself as a Sith Lord and wears robes. If you engage with that using only subconscious "vibe" reasoning, you would have avoided them. If you engaged with that using verbal reasoning, they might convince you that "Sith" is just a flavorful way of saying anti-authoritarianism, and also that it's a "religion" and you're not supposed to "discriminate". Or, phrased slightly differently: verbal thinking increases the surface area through which you can get hacked.

Or, phrased slightly differently: verbal thinking increases the surface area through which you can get hacked.

This doesn’t seem quite right, because it is also possible to have an unconscious or un-verbalized sense that, e.g., you’re not supposed to “discriminate” against “religions”, or that “authority” is bad and any rebellion against “authority” is good, etc. If bringing such attitudes to conscious awareness and verbalizing them allows you to examine and discard them, have you excised a vulnerability or installed one? Not clear.

If bringing such attitudes to conscious awareness and verbalizing them allows you to examine and discard them, have you excised a vulnerability or installed one? Not clear.

Possibly both, but one thing breaks the symmetry: it is on average less bad to be hacked by distant forces than by close ones.

I think I usually understand why when I get bad vibes from someone.

  1. Yoga sex cults have a bad track record for turning out to be abusive. So, if I know the guy is in some kind of yoga sex cult, I am going to suspect that there will eventually be some sort of sex scandal, even if I don’t have evidence for the exact specifics.
  2. Given some past examples, I’ve seen, I now have a “tip of the iceberg” theory for bad behaviour. Like, if I know the guy has done some bad stuff, it is statistically likely that he’s also involved in some other bad stuff that I wasn’t in a position to observe,

The AI risk community seems to be more frequently adjacent to “crazy Buddhist yoga sex cult” than I would have expected.

Well, that's the Bay Area for you - ground zero for both computer-related things and the hippie movement.

when I first encountered Eliezer Yudkowsky, I actually had a bad vibe about him. If I’d followed that feeling, I would’ve missed out on learning from one of the authors who has helped me a lot.

Have you ever been completely wrong about a bad vibe? If so, what did you learn from it?

I learned a lot from him and I STILL have a bad vibe about him. People can be correct, useful, and also unsafe. (Primarily, I suspect him to be high on scales of narcissism, to which I'm very sensitive. Haven't met the guy personally, but his text reeks of it. Doesn't negate his genius; just negates my will to engage with him in any other dimension.)

Of course, vibes are not infallible. As I mentioned in the post, a bad first vibe can change when you get to know someone more. So if you can collect more information in a low-risk way, it may be worth it. Reading someone's writing is usually (though not always) pretty low-risk.

I think a lot of my learning when I've changed my mind about someone's vibe has been implicit, similar to what Anni's comment is pointing at. Getting a better sense of what flavors of bad feelings are less reliable, which I expect to also update the mechanism that produced those particular kinds of vibes in the first place.

How often do we risk losing something important by assigning too high a priority to a bad vibe?

Personally, I try not to ignore any vibe or thought, but I also attempt to prioritize them by importance. Maybe I should start a 'bad vibes journal'—a record of every time I feel something off and then compare it to the actual outcomes. My sense is that I often misjudge, but without tracking it, I can’t really calibrate my accuracy.
 

Agreed. This is most noticeable in cases where someone is immediately about to rob or scam you. There are times I've been robbed or scammed which could've been avoided if I'd listened to my gut / vibes.

Vibes tend to be based on pattern matching, and are prone to bucket errors, so it's important to watch out for that - particularly for people with trauma. For instance, I tend to automatically dislike anyone who has even one mannerism in common with either of my parents, and it takes me quite a while to identify exactly what it is that's causing it. It usually isn't their fault and they're quite nice people, but the most annoying part is it doesn't go away just because I know that. This drastically reduces the range of people I can feel comfortable around.

Thanks for the essay! I really appreciate occasional reminders of the importance of not automatically discarding intuitions, feelings, or non-explicit thoughts. These can often carry valuable information that might not be immediately accessible to our conscious reasoning.

I’ve had a few experiences with “vibe checking,” and over time, my reflex has evolved into asking myself: What did my unconscious notice that led to this heuristic? This framing helps me align my intuitions with explicit evaluation criteria, comparing what I feel to what I consciously understand about the situation or person. When I can pinpoint the source of a vibe, I consciously choose whether to endorse or override it. If the source remains unclear, I tend to default to an “evolutionary psychology” perspective—assuming that my intuitions evolved to help me in an ancestral context, and unless I know a specific instinct is maladaptive in this situation, I err on the side of caution.

I’ve had a few recent experiences that seem relevant to the topic. I recently changed environments (new workplace) and have been introducing “rationality concepts” to someone with no prior knowledge of the topic. In this process, I've been questionned on my belief about the world my value and of possible prejudice caused by these opinions. 

Here are two recent cases where I noticed my own heuristics in action:

  1. Assigning roles based on physical tasks: When thinking of who to call to move furniture, I felt it more natural to involve “men” (many cis, one trans) despite the trans man not being particularly buff. This prompted me to examine whether I held a prejudice linking masculinity to physical strength. Upon reflection, I realized I was evaluating a mix of two factors: physical strength and grit. I associate grit—perseverance and toughness—more strongly with masculinity, which heavily influenced my selection process. This realization helped me separate the two traits and recognize how much weight I was giving to perceived grit over physical attributes (and my belief that both of these are correlated to "men/male" and my brain took a short-cut)..
  2. Epistemic and expertise biases: I noticed that in some interactions (depends on topic & interlocutor), I don’t expect my interlocutors to spot inconsistencies or teach me something new about a belief I have. This led me to examine whether I was holding a prejudice toward certain groups or individuals. On reflection, I realized I tend to assess two dimensions in others:

    • Epistemic clarity: Their ability to articulate a clear, internally consistent worldview, along with their confidence calibration.
    • Expertise: Whether they’ve been exposed to topics I haven’t and have synthesized those experiences into insights I find valuable.

    These assessments aren’t necessarily prejudicial, but they are heuristics that shape my expectations of others. Recognizing this has helped me question whether these assumptions are fair and whether I might be missing out on valuable perspectives. I will try to keep that way of thinking a habit of mine (hopefully it will stick !)

I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on this topic and the discussion it has sparked. It’s fascinating to unpack these layers of intuition, especially when they can guide or mislead in subtle ways.

Glad you found it useful!

In case you hadn't ran into the term yet, the thing about conflating strength, grit and masculinity sounds like an instance of a bucket error.

Thanks for the reply! Great catch regarding the bucket error 😊. I’m familiar with the concept (in fact, I was discussing it just an hour ago), despite that my thought process arrived at the bucket error indirectly, so it took me longer to recognize. Bucket errors are definitely one of the first things I should check when noticing a heuristic at play.

I’ll work on making “spotting bucket errors” a more automatic mental habit—it seems especially useful for quickly disentangling heuristics in real-time social situations. Thanks again for the reminder!

I've had similar experiences where my intuition tells me to be cautious but I could not say why. When I've ignored those intuitions I've generally paid a price. So now I do give them consideration. 

In such situations it is probably good to take some time to sit back and try to identify some of the things that triggered the response. We are very good at pattern matching but also really good at filtering. Could be that intuitions like "getting bad vibes" is all about the interaction of the two.

But that is a pretty difficult task, we're asking our self to go back and review all the details we ignored and filtered. But I suspect it is a very good thing to try doing.

I don’t have any rigorous principled argument for this, other than just the empirical personal observation that ignoring the feeling usually seems to be a mistake.

Likewise only empirical personal observation, but having interviewed and hired (or not) a lot of people. I would say I have got better over time - and separating first impression/prejudice from vibe is mostly achievable. And vibe definitely counts and is valid. 

There are also people who I trust to be much better than me at hiring good people, and they also consider vibe valid (but are also very rigorous about applying wide ranging interview&selection methods).... And there are people I trust to be awful at choosing people!

Normally though I would say you can find some way to put that vibe into a more specific concern/worry. And then you can normally create some form of question or test that might give a little more data on whether your concern is valid. 

Clearly not all situations give the luxury of devising such a thing, but often just a couple of minutes of conversation can be enough. 

I've never worked in HR, and I don't think that any of my friends have, either, so I know very little about the field. What are the channels of feedback that you (or HR professionals more generally) use to evaluate hiring decisions after the fact?

Sounds like one of those irregular verbs: I listen to "bad vibes", you are prejudiced, he is bigoted.

This doesn’t seem like it’s engaging with any of the specific things Kaj said attempting to address this. If you disagree with that it seems more helpful to actually say why you don’t think his framing or advice around “is this prejudice or a legit bad vibe?” is sufficient/ reasonable. 

(I read it as humor rather than criticism.)

Agree, we're not so shy about pursuing a good vibe, bad vibes are also informative.

I guess I frame this as "vibes are signals too". Like if my body doesn't like someone, that's a signal. And it might be they smell or have an asymmetric face, but also they might have some distrustworthy trait that my body recognises (because figuring out lying is really important evolutionarily). 

I think it's good to analyse vibes and figure out if unfair judgemental things are enough to account for most of the bad vibes or if there is a missing component that may be fair.

I feel a satisfaction hearing that some figure on social media is embroiled in a controversy and realizing that I had muted them a long time ago. The common themes that turn me off to people in general is

  1. Humor based on punching down, deriding easy targets in a way that implies a natural superiority over a superficially detestable outgroup
  2. Huckster-like communication style, where grandiose, far-off promises  are supported by conveniently unfalsifiable claims.
  3. Tactical, endless derision of an enemy indiscriminately, even when the derogatory claims contradict
  4. Self-aggrandizement or insults based on immutable traits
  5. Lacking any ability to self-deprecate unless the self-deprecation is made obvious to lack any substance

I would say: don't ignore the feeling. Calibrate it and train it, until it's worth listening to.

there's a good book about this: "Sizing People Up"

Does anyone have any generally helpful advice for someone who doesn't really get vibes? Should I just continue to be more timid than normal, or is there a helpful heuristic I can use (aside from the 'don't talk to strangers, don't join MLM's, be wary of things that are too good to be true' stuff that our parents tell us at a young age.)

As with any expertise, the standard heuristic is “if you can’t do it in-house, outsource it”. In this case, that means “if you have a trusted friend who does ‘get vibes’, consult with them when in doubt (or even when not in doubt, for the avoidance thereof)”.

Of course, the other standard heuristic is “it takes expertise to recognize expertise”, so finding a sufficiently trusted friend to consult on such things may be difficult, if you do not already have any such. Likewise, principal-agent problems apply (although sufficiently close friends should be as close to perfect alignment with the principal as any agent can realistically get).

I think this post suffers from a lack of rigor regarding the limits of the advice. One limit is that, if you let your vibes steer you away from interpersonal interactions, then you'll eliminate interactions that have higher-than-average upside potential.

In most cases, most people's perceptions are similar to yours. (e.g. If you think that the guy who asked you out is weird, then most of the other women who he asked out probably think so, too.) Consequently, if you and everyone else in the same situation are steered by vibes, then your failures of judgement will be correlated. In other words, some interactions will be undervalued.

If you weren't steered by vibes, then you you could have harvested that difference in value. To piggy-back off of the examples that Said Achmiz gave:

  • Business venture: the upside potential is pretty obvious here. You'd be the first to a land grab, you'll get an exceptionally talented business partner, etc.
  • Dating: you'd get a man or woman who is superficially unattractive in some way ("bad vibe" traits) but is a great catch overall.
  • Confidant: you'd gain a friend--probably one who's exceptionally loyal (due to being passed over by others) and might see the world very differently from you (correlated with their "bad vibes" traits)

When choosing whether to follow your vibes, remember that there is a Nash equilibrium. If everyone else follows their vibes, then your best option is to interrogate yours (as Said describes). If most people are ignoring their vibes, then your best option is to follow yours. Neither strategy is dominant.

I think, over years, I have collected some kind of "database" of patterns that usually result in having "bad vibes" from a person. Specific phrasings, mimics, gestures, clothing choices, etc. Although, I'm not sure just how much of that is inspired by the movie  villains.

Great post, I was inner simulating you posting something about bad vibes from people given your multiagent model of the mind and baggage which comes with it, and here it is.  

I will redact out the name of the person here, but it’s a moderately well known UK politician.

The question sometimes comes up as to whether X is an anti-Semite. To which, people have had direct dealings with X typically respond with something to that they don’t think X has it in for Jews specifically, but they think X is a complete asshole ..and then launch into telling some story of a thing X did that annoyed them. This is, to my mind, not exactly an endorsement of X’s character.

Ignoring everything underneath the title, this advice makes more convenient what people wanted to do anyway, changing nothing about the typical quality of the implementation; not the cruel extent nor the unjust kind of it. "Oh, not even rationalists will object? Excellent."

It would fall harshest on those who are most small, most libertarian, and most habitually argumentative, and not on dogmatic censors, nor coercive aesthetic isolationists, nor speech duressors.

If we have two kinds of people and two kinds of effects that this advice might have:

  1. Dogmatics who would use this as an excuse for censorship, with the world getting worse as they hear this message
  2. Genuinely thoughtful people inclined toward self-doubt who are encouraged to listen to their gut, with the world getting better as it helped them avoid substantial damage

Then I acknowledge that the first effect probably exists, but I expect the second effect to dominate. The kinds of people who would ignore everything underneath the title and were just looking for an excuse for dogmatism would likely find some other excuse anyway, so the size of the effect seems small. While the kinds of people who are thoughtful but heavy on self-doubt seem to me much more substantially affected by public messaging giving them permission to listen to their intuition. (Source: I'm one, and I think I would have benefited from this kind of advice.)

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