[HN Gopher] Theses on Sleep
___________________________________________________________________
Theses on Sleep
Author : wosk
Score : 55 points
Date : 2022-02-10 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (guzey.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (guzey.com)
| jameoblameo wrote:
| I like that this challenges some assumptions, but it does very
| little to discredit the AMPLE research in the area. Other than to
| say, let's not trust old research, which is kind of a gas-lighty
| way to look at it.
| guzey wrote:
| I'm curious - what do you believe I should've done? How do you
| discredit a p-hacked small-n experiment, aside from noting that
| it should not be trusted a priori due to the extreme bias of
| the results expected from such kind of studies?
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| Is all sleep science based p-hacked small-n experiments?
|
| To your point - I probably would have tried to rely on
| research that supports your points (which you've got me
| interested in now). I probably wouldn't have included a
| handful of anecdotes in the the appendix (including your own
| and Elon Musk's!), as well as 8 replies from a reddit thread
| as a supporting section. I probably also wouldn't equate "a
| person with an ADRB1 mutation can sleep less" and "a single
| individual that underwent brain surgery can sleep less" with
| "Decreasing sleep by 1-2 hours a night in the long-term has
| no negative health effects". I wouldn't include any arguments
| that say modern sleep is "unnatural", which doesn't have any
| real meaning or basis in reality (is modern medicine natural?
| what about sanitation?). The analogy to hunger is a
| justification rather than any type of proof, and taking the
| analogy further, it would suggest I should go back to sleep
| in the morning since I usually wake up sleepy, just as I
| would eat more when I'm hungry. I would be careful about
| saying sleep duration is a cause of depression/mania rather
| than considering both might be driven by a confounding
| variable (stimulants will certainly cause both mania and
| wakefulness!). I also probably wouldn't make claims like:
|
| > Convincing a million 20-year-olds to sleep an unnecessary
| hour a day is equivalent, in terms of their hours of
| wakefulness, to killing 62,500 of them.
|
| Without considering that you might be wrong about lifespan
| (not to mention healthspan) since you might very well be
| convincing others to effect a behavior change with your post.
| guzey wrote:
| >I probably also wouldn't equate "a person with an ADRB1
| mutation can sleep less" and "a single individual that
| underwent brain surgery can sleep less" with "Decreasing
| sleep by 1-2 hours a night in the long-term has no negative
| health effects".
|
| I made 5 points in that section (https://guzey.com/theses-
| on-sleep/#decreasing-sleep-by-1-2-h...):
|
| > 1. A sleep researcher who trains sailors to sleep
| efficiently in order to maximize their race performance
| believes that 4.5-5.5 hours of sleep is fine.
|
| > 2. 70% of 84 hunter-gatherers studied in 2013 slept less
| than 7 hours per day, with 46% sleeping less than 6 hours.
|
| > 3. A single-point mutation can decrease the amount of
| required sleep by 2 hours, with no negative side-effects.
|
| > 4. A brain surgery can decrease the amount of sleep
| required by 3 hours, with no negative-side effects.
|
| > 5. Sleep is not required for memory consolidation.
|
| You cited (3) and (4) but ignored (1), (2), and (5) all of
| which are based on studying dozens and hundreds of people.
| tayo42 wrote:
| There's a lot, the appeal to how humans lived 10k years ago seems
| odd though. Just because they lived in a certain way doesn't mean
| it's optimal. This is plainly obvious when you look at diets.
| Just because something was done out of necessity doesn't mean
| it's right. Weak argument right off the bat.
| James_Henry wrote:
| I don't think he's using the appeal to say that the way pre-
| industrial people live is optimal. He's saying that maybe 7-9
| hours isn't optimal.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| This essay convinced me to experiment with 6 hour sleep days.
| Excited to see what happens.
| reactspa wrote:
| _> I have been able to find exactly one pre-registered experiment
| of the impact of prolonged sleep deprivation on cognition. It was
| published by economists from Harvard and MIT in 2020 and its pre-
| registered analysis found null effects of sleep on all variables
| of interest Bessone P, Rao G, Schilbach F, Schofield H, Toma M.
| The economic consequences of increasing sleep among the urban
| poor. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 2021
| Aug;136(3):1887-941.(the authors changed analysis post-hoc and
| fished out some significant effects. Notably, they put the post-
| hoc results into the abstract but decided not to mention the
| null-preregistered results there or anywhere else in the paper
| explicitly )._
|
| This is the highest quality of research from the most fancied
| universities, and it was pre-registered (the gold standard of
| oversight). And even they were dishonest with the results. For
| me, personally, this single paragraph is enough to shut the door
| on all (all) psychology research.
| maldusiecle wrote:
| If it was published by economists, in an economics journal,
| doesn't that suggest you're condemning the wrong field?
| personalityson wrote:
| Sleep fasting? Maybe occasional fasting in everything can be
| good. Food, sex, sleep, social interactions.
| neves wrote:
| Do not spend time reading it. From the article:
|
| "I have no trust in sleep scientists
|
| Why do I bother with all of this theorizing? Why do I think I can
| discover something about sleep that thousands of them couldn't
| discover over many decades?
|
| The reason is that I have approximately 0 trust in the integrity
| of the field of sleep science."
|
| By the way, he criticizes the book: "Why we sleep". Sure the book
| exaggerates, but it shouldn't be completely disqualified. BTW, if
| you like this book, you will probably like Oracle of the Night:
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/07/the-oracle-of-...
| _dain_ wrote:
| funny, this makes me even more desirous to read it
| guzey wrote:
| For those interested, here's my critique of sleep science
| (https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/#our-priors-about-sleep-
| re...):
|
| >Do you believe in power-posing? In ego depletion? In hungry
| judges and brain training? [1]
|
| >If the answer is no, then your priors for our knowledge about
| sleep should be weak because "sleep science" is mostly just
| rebranded cognitive psychology, with the vast majority of it
| being small-n, not pre-registered, p-hacked experiments.
|
| >I have been able to find exactly one pre-registered experiment
| of the impact of prolonged sleep deprivation on cognition. It
| was published by economists from Harvard and MIT in 2020 and
| its pre-registered analysis found null effects of sleep on all
| variables of interest [2] (the authors changed analysis post-
| hoc and fished out some significant effects. Notably, they put
| the post-hoc results into the abstract but decided not to
| mention the null-preregistered results there or anywhere else
| in the paper explicitly).
|
| >So why has sleep research not been facing a severe replication
| crisis, similar to psychology?
|
| >First, compared to psychology, where you just have people fill
| out questionnaires, sleep research is slow, relatively
| expensive, and requires specialized equipment (e.g. EEG,
| actigraphs). So skeptical outsiders go for easier targets (like
| social psychology) while the insiders keep doing the same
| shoddy experiments because they need to keep their careers
| going somehow.
|
| >Second, imagine if sleep researchers had conclusively shown
| that sleep is not important for memory, health, etc. - would
| they get any funding? No. Their jobs are literally predicated
| on convincing the NIH and other grantmakers that sleep is
| important. As Patrick McKenzie notes [3], "If you want a
| problem solved make it someone's project. If you want it
| managed make it someone's job."
|
| >Even in medicine, without pre-registered RCTs truth is
| extremely difficult to come by, with more than one half [4] of
| high-impact cancer papers failing to be replicated, and with
| one half of RCTs without pre-registration of positive outcomes
| being spun [5] by researchers as providing benefit when there's
| none. And this is in medicine, which is infinitely more
| consequential and rigorous than psychology.
|
| And here's my critique of Why We Sleep, which the author of the
| comment above decided to omit for some reason:
|
| >Here are just a few of biggest issues (there were many more)
| with the book.
|
| >1. Walker wrote: "Routinely sleeping less than six or seven
| hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling
| your risk of cancer", despite there being no evidence that
| cancer in general and sleep are related. There are obviously no
| RCTs on this, and, in fact, there's not even a correlation
| between general cancer risk and sleep duration. [6]
|
| >2. Walker falsified a graph from an academic study in the
| book. [7]
|
| >3. Walker outright fakes data to support his "sleep epidemic"
| argument. The data on sleep duration Walker presents on the
| graph below simply does not exist [8]
|
| [1] https://www.gleech.org/psych
|
| [2] https://economics.mit.edu/files/16994
|
| [3] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1223695673742151680
|
| [4] https://www.science.org/content/article/more-half-high-
| impac...
|
| [5]
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
|
| [6] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#also-no----sleeping-
| le...
|
| [7] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-what-do-
| you-d...
|
| [8] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#ok-even-if-the-who-
| nev...
| skrebbel wrote:
| Just a nitpick. In your quote it looks like the author is
| writing "I have no trust in sleep scientists [because] I have
| approximately 0 trust in the integrity of the field of sleep
| science".
|
| However, the first "I have no trust in sleep scientists" is a
| heading, which makes the rest sound less ridiculous - the
| "because" part simply comes after the part you quoted.
| extr wrote:
| A lot of this stuff matches my experience. I'm a classic night
| owl and occasionally subject myself to acute sleep deprivation (<
| 3-4 hours of sleep). Typically the next day I'm in weirdly good
| humor, slightly manic, and feel as if my senses have been
| heightened. My girlfriend thinks I'm crazy for saying this, but I
| enjoy the feeling. If the sleep deprivation turns into multiple
| days, I begin to become sluggish and irritable...but I try not to
| let that happen.
| Twisol wrote:
| As a night owl _and_ an introvert, there 's this perverse
| feedback loop where I'm incentivized to be underslept before an
| important presentation, because the slight good humor / mania /
| heightened senses (and, I would add, a mild numbness to
| peoples' judgments about me) help me do a better job of the
| presentation.
|
| Of course, I'm not advocating that people be totally loopy! But
| there's a weird Ballmer peak-esque [1] effect.
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/323/
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Perhaps coincidentally, but I can rarely sleep more then 6 hours
| in a night. It seems that I've always been that way. My eyes just
| open after about 6 hours, and I feel the need to get out of bed.
| The only way I've ever been able to get more is when I'm hungover
| or ill.
|
| I don't ever feel like I need to sleep more, but the anxiety I
| get from all the sleep studies telling me I do need to sleep
| more, sure does keep me up at night!
| nnoitra wrote:
| Do you feel fully rested after 6 hours?
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| I wonder if you have either of the known genetic mutations
| related to a shorter sleep duration. I understand it's pretty
| rare, but some percentage of the population have them and you
| might be one of the lucky few!
| quacked wrote:
| Irrelevant to the post, but relevant to sleeping--I fixed my
| trouble sleeping with candles.
|
| Right before I want to go to sleep, I darken the whole house,
| light one or two candles, and read a slow-paced book. 15 minutes
| to drowsiness, 5 minutes to sleep, every time. I'll even look at
| a blue-light screen right up until candle-time.
| James_Henry wrote:
| Be aware that candles cause air pollution that can especially
| be an issue in homes with poor ventilation.
| quesera wrote:
| A friend of mine did that.
|
| Burned her house down, killed her pets (fish), and barely
| survived herself.
|
| She now recommends not leaving candles burning unattended.
|
| There might be a battery-powered candle-like LED thing that
| gets the same results.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| LEDs are counter productive to sleep. The solution here would
| be a safe candleholder that is able to be left unattended
| without setting fires.
| James_Henry wrote:
| If it's a dim LED with just red light or maybe just red and
| orange then it's probably just as good, no?
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| The flickering will be there no matter the color. Red
| ones will be better than white or blue ones, but that's
| it. They still have the opposite of a relaxing effect.
| dota_fanatic wrote:
| _> My sleep statistics tells me that I slept an average of 5:25
| hours over the last 7 days, 5:49 hours over the last 30 days, and
| 5:57 over the last 180 days hours, meaning that I'm awake for 18
| hours per day instead of 16.5 hours. I usually sleep 5.5-6 hours
| during the night and take a nap a few times a week when sleepy
| during the day._
|
| _> This means that I'm gaining 33 days of life every year. 1
| more year of life every 11 years. 5 more years of life every 55
| years._
|
| _> Why are people not all over this?_
|
| Because that's not how humans work. You're gaining 33 days of
| being not-asleep in sum per year. More accurately, you're getting
| however many more minutes _per wakeful period_. And gaining
| minutes of being not-asleep per day is very different from
| "gaining days of life every year". Life != being awake. Things
| are _happening_ during sleep. Useful things.
|
| Personally, I spent many years doing what you're recommending
| when I was younger. Felt low-level sleepy all the time. Used
| caffeine off-and-on to blunt the effect. Now I've gotten into a
| good enough homeostasis that I don't need alarms and I don't
| oversleep. I never feel sleepy except for the moments before
| falling asleep at night or on the rare occasions where I have to
| wake up early. I love sleep now. I protect it and it protects me.
|
| The quality of a day depends on how it was spent. The quality of
| a life is the summation of all those days. Adding 30 minutes to
| each day's wakeful period is not some huge gain in efficiency
| like you're making it out to be. And for me, gaining thirty more
| minutes actually makes the quality of the rest of the minutes in
| that day worse. I low-key despise society for making me think I
| needed to _do more_ such that sacrificing my sleep and normal
| alertness for more time spent awake was a good trade.
|
| I recommend looking into the concept of healthspan. Optimize for
| area under the curve, not time spent awake.
| guzey wrote:
| So what you are saying is that, just like me, in your 20s you
| were optimize for getting shit done and now, being older, you
| optimize for feeling good and don't care about _doing_ as much
| and think that optimizing for doing earlier was a mistake for
| you. This is reasonable!
| dota_fanatic wrote:
| No. I am able to do much more now, now that I respect the
| signals my body is sending. Sometimes I have to force things,
| reality demands it, but generally I work with my body on any
| given day, not against it. The increase quality and amount of
| work is undeniable, generally and on average.
|
| I can only imagine how much more capable I would be if I had
| had a better relationship with sleep and my body in general
| when I was younger, so the benefits of those behaviors could
| have compounded over a longer time frame.
| balfirevic wrote:
| It's hard to me to even start considering whether I might be
| sleeping too much or whether sleeping less is not actually that
| bad, when the act of forcefully waking up (due to noise, alarm or
| whatever) is something I would classify as not too far from
| torture.
|
| Does this simply not bother other people that much?
| xlaacid wrote:
| This essay, convinced me that people with no domain specific
| knowledge can cherry-pick ideas to support any BS they want
| georgewsinger wrote:
| https://twitter.com/alexeyguzey/status/1490664815039234051
|
| I think the author has been pretty forthright in seeking
| critiques from professional sleep researchers and
| neuroscientists.
| nnoitra wrote:
| I will post random theories about the nature of the universe
| and I'll tweet that I'm expecting critiques from physicists
| about my theory.
|
| Damn, should look good on a resume.
| guzey wrote:
| Hilarious. Except for the fact that a bunch of
| neuroscientists actually read my draft and gave me comments
| a lot of which I incorporated in the essay, e.g.
| https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/#appendix-philipp-
| streiche...
| aaron695 wrote:
| tomp wrote:
| Here is another one of Alexey's essays that might convince you
| that people with _tons_ of domain-specific knowledge (and
| credentials too!) can _also_ cherry-pick ideas to support any
| BS they want.
|
| https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
|
| Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and
| Factual Errors
| rich_sasha wrote:
| The whole "natural" thing is maybe a good source of ideas to try,
| but that's it.
|
| A list of things that are totally unnatural: brushing teeth,
| antibiotics, painkillers, surgery, hip replacements,
| antidepressants, infant mortality below 10%, not dying of an ear
| infection, clean chlorinated water...
| guzey wrote:
| For the readers, here's my actual argument
| (https://guzey.com/theses-on-sleep/#comfortable-modern-
| sleep-...):
|
| >1. Experiencing hunger is normal and does not necessarily
| imply that you are not eating enough. Never being hungry means
| you are probably eating too much.
|
| >2. Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily
| imply that you are undersleeping. Never being sleepy means you
| are probably sleeping too much.
| RandomThrow321 wrote:
| And here's an excerpt where you repeatedly say that modern
| sleep is unnatural.
|
| > Modern sleep, in its infinite comfort, is an unnatural
| superstimulus that overwhelms our brains with pleasure and
| comfort (note: I'm not saying that it's bad, simply that
| being in bed today is much more pleasurable than being in
| "bed" in the past.)
|
| > Think about sleep 10,000 years ago. You sleep in a cave, in
| a hut, or under the sky, with predators and enemy tribes
| roaming around. You are on a wooden floor, on an animal's
| skin, or on the ground. The temperature will probably drop
| 5-10degC overnight, meaning that if you were comfortable when
| you were falling asleep, you are going to be freezing when
| you wake up. Finally, there's moon shining right at you and
| all kinds of sounds coming from the forest around you.
|
| > In contrast, today: you sleep on your super-comfortable
| machine-crafted foam of the exact right firmness for you. You
| are completely safe in your home, protected by thick walls
| and doors. Your room's temperature stays roughly constant,
| ensuring that you stay warm and comfy throughout the night.
| Finally, you are in a light and sound-insulated environment
| of your house. And if there's any kind of disturbance you
| have eye masks and earplugs.
|
| > Does this sound "natural"?
| nnoitra wrote:
| Ouch. Ambient sounds of the forest are a lot better than
| the modern equivalent of loud neighbors and drilling. He
| also seems to have forgotten that humans built fires. Caves
| have great sound insulation and I'm pretty sure our
| ancestors knew how to choose their caves.
|
| I have spent years being a sleep deprived student because
| the dorms were super noisy with random parties and paper
| thin walls so I really can't relate to the implied utter
| comfortable sleeping habits of modern people. I'm sure
| there are people complaining about noise pollution in NY as
| well.
|
| No one in my circle sleeps on an overpriced mattress.
| Mostly it's just the bed the place that we rent has. I
| never could connect with articles implying modern people
| live in these utterly comfortable utopias when it's really
| not the case. People are depressed. Especially males are
| doing horribly.
| James_Henry wrote:
| People have research modern pre-industrial societies and
| while they do have fires and nicer sounds than drilling
| they don't sleep in caves. Also birds are really loud
| sometimes.
|
| I don't think you'd want to sleep in their circumstances
| over yours, but maybe you would. I for one like camping
| quite a bit even though I do usually get much less sleep
| while camping because I'll stay up late around a fire and
| then wake up at sunrise. I'm sure that'd change if I were
| out in the woods for more than a week.
|
| Also, maybe your not-utterly-comfortable utopia is making
| people, maybe especially males, depressed!
| georgewsinger wrote:
| A few years ago I bought a mattress for less than $100
| from Amazon to sleep on.
|
| While it was funny to complain about how uncomfortable
| this cheap mattress was, it was still an extremely
| luxurious piece of technology unfathomable to any cave
| dweller.
|
| It doesn't seem so crazy to me to wonder whether modern
| mattresses like these are incentivizing us to sleep
| longer than what is optimal.
| guzey wrote:
| Yep, and here's conclusion of this argument:
|
| >Now, what if the only sleep available to you was modern
| sleep?
|
| > 1. If you don't sleep at all, you go crazy, because some
| amount of sleep is necessary.
|
| > 2. If you sleep just enough to be awake during the day,
| you'll be dreaming of getting a nap at the sight of a bed
| and will be distracted and sleepy all the time.
| Importantly, I claim, in this situation, the feeling of
| sleepiness does not mean that you should sleep more - it's
| your brain being overpowered by a superstimulus while being
| bored.
|
| 3. I claim that if you sleep as much as you want, you'll
| probably sleep too much and become more susceptible to
| depression. [by analogy to eating too much]
|
| - And if you sleep way too much at once, you'll be feeling
| terrible afterwards, however pleasant the sleep was.
| dreig wrote:
| You may attempt to apply the same analogy to drinking
| water, and see that it doesn't work. If you drink as much
| as you want, then you'll probably drink too much (with
| whatever negative consequences arising as a result). But,
| except for some extreme circumstances, I don't think
| people drink much more than is necessary to quench their
| thirst.
|
| That is your conclusion might still be correct, but it
| doesn't follow from the analogy with eating.
| guzey wrote:
| Is drinking modern water a superstimulus like modern junk
| food from my analogy is?
| [deleted]
| slibhb wrote:
| Is there any way to not experience sleepiness or hunger? Do
| overweight people never experience hunger?
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| The opposite is generally more true, where the inability to
| feel satiety or feeling constant hunger will be the main
| factor in some of the problems that cause overweight.
| ksdale wrote:
| I feel like a bunch of the points on this list actually have an
| analog in Guzey's argument? Brushing teeth, for example - we do
| it to have a "clean" mouth, but a lot of people use mouthwash
| until the bacterial environment in their mouth is a barren
| wasteland, which is also unhealthy. Moderation is good.
|
| Antibiotics are the same - they can also kill the flora in our
| intestines, and they can also lead to the creation of much more
| deadly microbes. Moderation is good.
|
| Painkillers - Literally an opioid epidemic in the US right, not
| to mention all of the people taking OTC pain medication rather
| than addressing the cause of the pain, be it an underlying
| injury or lack of physical fitness, etc. The pain medication
| allows them to ignore a problem in a way that ultimately makes
| it worse. Moderation is good.
|
| Harder to find analogs for the other things, and obviously I
| think all of these things are good on net, but just like food,
| excessive consumption isn't necessarily good.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Natural things: arsenic, uranium, viruses, tetanus, polio, eye-
| eating fungus, tornado, earthquakes, volcano eruptions.
|
| The Mother Nature's goodness.
| FailMore wrote:
| Potentially of relevance, a paper I wrote on a possible function
| of dreaming during REM sleep:
|
| A Suggestion for a New Interpretation of Dreams: Dreaming Is the
| Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering
|
| https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz
|
| Discussed on hacker news here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| > Think about sleep 10,000 years ago. You sleep in a cave, in a
| hut, or under the sky, with predators and enemy tribes roaming
| around. You are on a wooden floor, on an animal's skin, or on the
| ground.
|
| I would argue that some of my best nights were during outdoor
| survival situations where I slept in small shelters that kept my
| warmth and on a hard surface.
|
| Personally, the sound of a familiar bird species will lull me to
| sleep. Birds sing when it's safe. Silence in nature is when you
| should worry.
|
| Having slept on bear skins, those are surprisingly comfortable.
| That's why it's such a trope in romance. You can easily fall
| asleep on one and be comfortable all night. Throw in a few
| friends and you have got a cozy experience. Three people will
| keep a bed very warm even without heating to the point where you
| must open windows and get rid of covers.
|
| Have we forgotten that our species has used fire as a tool for at
| least 2 million years? Usually, a fire would be kept going all
| night which would keep the camping ground dry and warm.
|
| Has the author ever slept in the wild? Birds waking you? If this
| held true, no one would be able to sleep in rural areas.
|
| This thesis seems to extrapolate a lot without paying attention
| to the details. It presents ideas as common sense and proceeds to
| mislead the reader through cherry-picked information that is a
| prime example of the confirmation bias.
| Zababa wrote:
| Very interesting article. I'll try that myself, could be a fun
| experiment. The parallel with fasting was surprising to me,
| though now it sounds obvious. Outside of whether or not the
| author is right about their theory, this calls for more rigorous
| science on sleep. The value of even a small chance of adding 1/2
| hours to the life of people is immense.
| ninesnines wrote:
| Yes, please, do continue to slam a whole field that you are not
| yourself in. Love hearing from people who love to just cherry
| pick a couple of articles to support their claims. _eye roll_
| guzey wrote:
| >Yes, please, do continue to slam a whole field that you are
| not yourself in. Love hearing from people who love to just
| cherry pick a couple of articles to support their claims. eye
| roll
|
| I wholeheartedly agree. Similarly, people outside of astrology
| shouldn't be criticizing astrology.
| James_Henry wrote:
| Hey, be careful with that criticism there. I don't know that
| you are in the same field as ninesnines
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Everyone is able to criticize anyone. Which is why people are
| criticizing your blog post.
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