$ excluded = ["sex", "sleeping", "angry", "in pain", "sad", "scared", "bathing"] ?
Maybe the above? I am not sure, it should have worked...
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Edit: You should not get a syntax error but it might not be safe, I don't remember what we do in the function but if you pass an object around through references like that and it is modified, all references pointing would still point to that (now) modified object. So it depends on what we do with in in the function.
You way is cleaner in either case, if we modify that list somehow, we can just make a copy of it making sure it's safe {"exclude": excluded[:]} for example.