The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson

Some books of the Bible are full of “begats”, such as “Abraham begat Isaac who begat Jacob” and so on. The genealogy of a family or of an idea can tell us a lot about the nature of a family member or an idea and how members of the linage have changed through time. Thus, Nietzsche investigated The Genealogy of Morals. Darwin understood the whole of life on earth as a genealogy. The same can be said of ideas. 

As someone who is been interested in health and wellness for the most selfish of reasons—I like being healthy and well—I’ve read and tried a lot in that field for a long time. My current line of thinking is most prominently influenced by the paleo/primal lineage. For me, that lineage began when I read Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness. In that book, he cited the economics work of Art De Vany, and as an aside, he also mentioned De Vany’s work on nutrition and fitness This led me to art De Vany’s website, which was a treasure trove of information about how the developmental environment of human beings, especially during pre-agricultural times, shaped how our bodies function. This is especially true in areas of nutrition and exercise. De Vany pointed me to Mark Sisson’s blog, Mark’s Daily Apple. While Taleb comments on these issues from within his larger project, and De Vany has written an excellent book summarizing his thinking (The New Evolution Diet and reviewed again here), it’s been Mark Sisson at Mark’s Daily Apple and in his books who has provided the most continuous update of information and encouragement along this line of thinking.

If you’re new to primal (or paleo) thinking, it’s based on the idea that since human beings evolved in an environment that involved great variation in the availability of nutrition and demands for exercise, the re-creation of a pre-agricultural way of life—insomuch as that is possible within the contemporary context—is the best road to health. Most thinkers and writers in this tradition agree that this involves avoiding grains, which really came into human use only about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago during the Agricultural Revolution that allowed for civilization (cities) to exist. Grains provide a lot of carbohydrate and some proteins, but some of those proteins, like gluten, can cause serious problems. In addition, other forms of simple carbohydrates, especially immense amounts of sugar, are bad because of the insulin load they place on the body. In pre-agricultural times, food was often scarce, and when human beings came upon sources of sweet items, our bodies told us to eat up and our insulin signaled for us to store this source of calories. In our contemporary world, where calories are almost as easily available as the air we breathe, we just get fat. In addition to this type of nutritional advice, intense exercise comes as a standard recommendation, but not “chronic cardio” (long slog runs done repetively).  Lots of sleep, mental stimulation, and other changes are standard recommendations as well.

Sisson’s book outlines all of these factors and presents them clearly. Sisson does good job of mixing the science with practical recommendations. Sisson understands that being a purist isn’t likely to work for many people, so he underlines the importance of the 80/20 rule for persons attempting to follow the primal way of life.

I have been trying with varying degrees success to follow this regimen for health and wellness for several years. It hasn’t been easy in India, where it’s hard to get a clean piece of meat or a decent salad. Many persons here are vegetarian, but vegetarianism isn’t primal and probably isn’t all that healthy. If you don’t order a chapatti (flatbread) or rice with a meal, waiters will look at you with stunned silence waiting you for you to come to your senses. Similarly, sweets are big thing here. (And so is type II diabetes.) It’s hard to resist the mangoes (my goodness, they are sweet!) and so on. Let’s be honest, I suffer from a certain weakness of will in these areas, but when I saw myself tipping the scale too far, I got back on the wagon and used the occasion to read Sisson’s book (again). There couldn’t have been a better coach and advisor.

If you are interested in developing an effective, fun, and healthy way of life, I don’t think I could suggest a better blueprint. In the popular press and in nutritional literature, advice about nutrition and eating is freely given and poorly supported. It’s easy (I know because I’ve done it) to try to alter your eating habits with every new article you read in the press, but the more I consider it, the more I think it’s so much nonsense created by poorly designed studies, confirmational or pecuniary biases, and a failure to appreciate how the complexity of the human body and the human environment. The primal way seems to work for me, to work for others, and to make a great deal of sense when looked at within the context of evolutionary biology. Of course, I think any of the primal/paleo thinkers that I mentioned here would recommend empirical verification of what they’re talking about. In other words, try it seriously and see if it doesn’t work for you. I think it’s worked for me reasonably well, the only limits I found so far are that I don’t adhere to the recommendations as well as I should. But with the likes of Mark Sisson behind me at Mark’s Daily Apple and in his books, I still hold out some hope.

Happiness: A Guide to LIfe's Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard

“Happiness” is a word, like the word “love”, that seems to have as many different meanings and nuances as there are people to utter them. For a writer to do it delve into the subject of happiness requires either a large degree of foolhardiness or a lot of courage. Matthieu Ricard, the author of this book, has a lot of courage.

My immediately preceding post reviewed a book by B Alan Wallace, one of the most interesting and persuasive teachers in the Buddhist tradition today. I have to say that if he has a challenger within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition it would be Matthieu Ricard. Like Wallace, Ricard came from a privileged background. His mother was an artist and his father the well-known French intellectual Jean-Francois Revel (author of Without Marx or Jesus). Matthieu grew up in the artistic and intellectual milieu of Paris in the 1960s. He eventually entered into the study of biology and received a post at the prestigious Pasteur Institute. There he was a graduate student of the Nobel prize-winning biologist François Jacob. However, despite his fast track to a successful career in Paris, he ventured to India and studied in the Tibetan tradition. After finishing his doctoral work, he moved to Tibet and undertook the life of a Buddhist monk. Since then he has served as French language translator for the Dalai Lama, and he serves as another bridge, like Alan Wallace, between the intricate and sometimes daunting world of Tibetan Buddhism and Western culture.

Ricard’s East-West pedigree makes Happiness work. Ricard undertakes a survey and appreciation of happiness from Western traditions and from Buddhism. The book considers a number of different possibilities for the source of happiness, and each perspective receives fair consideration. However, like any sensible person, he is quick to distinguish between mere pleasure, the fleeting happiness of a desire fulfilled, and something that runs much deeper. As you follow Ricard through the book in his consideration of the elements and possibilities that make up happiness and that can destroy it, you are in the hands of someone who has drunk deeply from wells both East and West.

As one considers the Buddhist project as a whole, from the time that the Buddha set forth the Four Noble Truths, you can fairly summarize it by saying that it seeks the path to happiness. The First Noble Truth speaks of dukka (suffering, unsatisfactoriness) and its pervasiveness, and the remainder of the Truths and the Noble Eight-fold Path are Buddha’s prescription for overcoming unhappiness. The flip is to say if we are not suffering, we should be happy. The Buddhist tradition from the Buddha himself to Ricard supports this assertion. Ricard carefully considers all of the ways in which our attitudes can get in the way of happiness. Ricard is not promoting some mindless idiot’s conception of happiness, but one that is deeply rooted in the workings of the mind and the values of compassion and loving-kindness. As a comprehensive path to happiness, the Buddhist tradition is as rich (if not richer) than any path that I know of. Ricard carefully lays forth this path while comparing it to Western conceptions that sometimes challenge it, but quite often complement it.

If you want to consider how to develop “life’s most important skill”, then you can’t expect to do better than this book. It is the equivalent of sitting at the feet of a wise sage who discourses about happiness in a well-organized, systematic, and accessible manner. Once again, Ricard uses his knowledge of the Western tradition and the Tibetan tradition to draw out the insights of each for the benefit of all.

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice by B. Alan Wallace

B. Alan Wallace is among the foremost practitioner-teachers of Buddhism today. He reports “while brought up in a Christian household, and even though I found great meaning in the teachings of Jesus, some of the church’s doctrines made no sense to me”. (Kindle Locations 71-72). He grew up in California, Scotland, and Switzerland. He started as an undergrad at UC San Diego and then he transferred to Göttingen in West Germany, moving from an ecology major at UCSD to a primary interest in philosophy and religion at Gottingen, where he studied the Tibetan language and Tibetan Buddhism. Then, instead of finishing his degree (great message for the parents, no doubt), in 1971 (I’m just transitioning from high school to college), he heads to Tibet. For the next 13 years he studied and meditated in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in India and Europe, and he came to serve as a translator for the Dalai Lama. After this phase of his life, he returned to academia to complete a degree at Amherst College in physics and philosophy of science. After another meditation retreat, he entered graduate studies in religion at Stanford University. He completed his doctorate, focusing his studies on “the interface between Buddhism and Western science and philosophy”. (B. Alan Wallace website). Since then he has taught, written a number of books for both academic and popular audiences, and he continues to teach meditation. Having read several of his works and now in the midst of listening to podcasts of his meditation retreats, I find him one of the most intriguing, no-nonsense, and persuasive teachers of Buddhism active today. 

This book, his most recent “academic” book (2011), addresses topics important to him. One of the attractive aspects of Buddhism to me and to many others, especially those of us coming from Western traditions, is its radical empiricism and willingness to undergo scrutiny. Wallace scrutinizes the Buddhist tradition, but the main target of his skepticism is Western materialism. Wallace is especially critical of academic psychology for its abandonment of the legacy of William James, who valued and promoted introspection as important source of data about the mind. (Indeed, James is obviously in intellectual hero to Wallace, as well as a great many others—including me.) Instead of following the lead of James, psychology turned to Watson’s behaviorism (no mind, just observable behavior), which was wedded to the ideas of 19^th century physics. Wallace is uniquely qualified to challenge the citadel of materialism from his background in physics and philosophy of science combined with his experience in Buddhism. 

While critical of Western materialism (we’re just stuff & consciousness a mere by-product of brain activity), Wallace unabashedly asserts the traditional Buddhist view, which includes an emphasis on mind and consciousness as more than just brain activity and where the paranormal (not magic) exists. Wallace makes these assertions as one who has been on the other side of reality from the majority of Western scientists and philosophers who adhere to the simple materialist paradigm. Wallace also notes the importance of ethical behavior in Buddhism and its effect on our perception of the world. This, too, contrasts markedly with the value-free attitude of Western science. Wallace discusses phenomena like “the placebo effect”, which Western science shunts aside without addressing the implications that physically inert substances can effect with body when combined with the non-physical world of information (even false information). Many in the West know to reject Descartes’s dualism of mind and body, but they attempt to go around it by going all body, no mind. But mind—as in the form of information—is a part of our reality. 

In addition to criticizing the materialists, Wallace also criticizes those who sell “mindfulness” as simply the practice of observing what passes through the mind. This is not Buddhism. Buddhist mindfulness involves mindfulness of right conduct, effort, and livelihood, among other things. It’s not just “whatever”, but an attempt to monitor the contents of the mind. 

All of this simply touches the surface of all that Wallace addresses and argues. His appreciation of the history and enterprise of Western science, Western philosophy and psychology, and traditional Buddhism make him a formidable author. Yet, for all of the depth of his analysis and argument, the book is well written and argued so that it’s easy to follow. In short, he’s an outstanding teacher whom I can’t recommend highly enough (this comes from listening to his podcasts as well). If you want to come into the deep end of the pool, you not find many guides as worthwhile as Wallace.

Sweet Tooth: A Novel by Ian McEwan

 Sweet Tooth is my second Ian McEwan novel, having read Saturday (item #21) a couple of years ago. I must say I’m taken with these two works, and I’m not quite sure why. The prose is solid and sensible, not showy or intrusive. The characters are mostly ordinary persons, neither remarkably good nor evil. In the course of reading this book, which attracted me because of its espionage setting and my prior good experience with McEwan, I asked if it was worth going forward after I was well into it. Not that the writing wasn’t good. But the central character (the narrator) wasn’t doing anything all that intriguing or engrossing. Yet I couldn’t leave it. I’m glad I didn’t give it up. McEwan built the suspense slowly and subtly, and while nothing spectacular happens, we receive regular doses of insight from the characters. It’s almost a sleight of hand trick. In the end, we have quite a cleaver and provocative dénouement that worked for me. 

The setting of the novel is Cold War, 70’s-turbulent Great Britain. Domestically, the country is a mess. Yet its secret service, MI5, yearns to remain a part of the Great Game of fighting Communism. This backdrop works well for anyone who remembers those times (even here in the States): spiked oil prices, unions, tired leadership, betrayals (Fourth and Fifth Men) were all a part of the scenery for any personal drama in those times. To all this add the turbulence of a young woman finding her way in the world. Serena Frome (rhymes with plumb) is the center the action. She’s an effective and perceptive narrator without betraying her limitations. She gets pulled into the secret world of MI5 after having grown up the daughter of an Anglican bishop who's tucked away in the countryside. She moves through the world by fits and starts, neither superlative nor lacking in basic good sense. Her problems, however, mount as she becomes involved with an author whom she meets as a professional target. The basic perfidy of spying and espionage—even of the friendly sort—inevitably takes a toll on her. 

I won’t go further, but if you’re looking for an adult read, one that constructs a world set in the not-too-distant past with characters with whom you can sympathize, then this book is for you.

Bounce: How Champions Are Made by Matthew Syed

I have to say that Bounce was a bit like taking a refresher course, having already read Geoff Covlin's Talent Is Overrated, Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code (entry #6), and Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, all three of which Syed acknowledges as worthy predecessors. So I didn't learn a great deal new from reading Bounce. But a refresher, with some new information added, is worthwhile, and so I found this book. I should also note that all four books draw on the pioneering work of academic psychologist Anders Ericsson.

If you want to develop a talent or a skill, practice deliberately (with a focused intention) for 10,000 hours, and you'll have gone a long way toward achieving your goal. Throw in outstanding peers and quality coaching, and you'll really go far. This formula for success replaces that idea that some are simply "talented". None of these authors gives much credence to genetics. It's about learning. Deliberate practice—practicing to improve specific skills and to cure weaknesses-is what allows real learning and significant improvement. Drive a car with no special thought to the matter and you'll be the same driver after 10,000 hours of driving. But do it in deliberately challenging ways and environments with the intention of improving and you could be the next Mario Andretti. (I know. I date myself.)

Seyd does go into some topics that his predecessors didn't, such as placebo effect, in other words, the power of belief. (Although he doesn't delve into it, the placebo effect raises some really interesting issues about the mind-body relationship and causation.) I also enjoyed his chapter on "choking", which any athlete or other performer has experienced. What it amounts to is that we "think" when we shouldn't. We try to teach the centipede to walk when it should (and does) just walk. This ties in to the power of ritual in performance, which is another fascinating subject full of bizarre anecdotes. As an old jock, I can attest to the power and command of rituals. In the last section, Seyd touches on drug enhancement, what's good and fair and human and what isn't (not clear) and genetics (are blacks better runners?). On the latter topic, Seyd takes down the idea that blacks, specifically sprinters from west Africa via  the U.S. and Jamaica and distance runners from Kenya (and later Ethiopia) have any special genetic endowments. It's simply the outlier effect—chance, environment, reward, opportunity, etc.—that makes all of the difference.

It was a fun, easy, and instructive book, valuable for anyone who has to perform. Like us humans. 

Buddhism & Modern Psychology taught by Robert Wright for Coursera

After years of listening to lectures from The Teaching Company that I enjoyed greatly while driving here and there, I decided to give my first MOOC (Massive Open On-Line Course) a try. I opted for Robert Wright's course on Buddhism & Modern Psychology taught from Princeton, where Wright holds a position. My long-running interest in Buddhism & my acquaintance with Wright led me to this choice. Wright is not a traditional academic (I don't think that he holds a doctorate), but he's written a lot of interesting things and has been active on the internet with bloggingheadstv.com/wrighshow and other endeavors. He's about my age (okay, like most people, a bit younger), and he's curious about and committed to topics that attract me.

So the MOOC  experience: pretty good. Best of all: I can play back Wright's talks at faster than normal speech (usually 1.75x). I'm kidding? No. Even if a talking head is talking about something that interests you (it does), it can still seem way too slow when you're only looking at a computer screen (not much in the way of visuals here). When driving, regular speed is fine because of the (partially) split attention, but looking at the screen and listening to a talk that you know the basics about (vocabulary, terms of art, etc; i.e., not too much drastically new), you can go faster. 

The other thing I conclude is that MOOCs can't replace the live classroom for serious learning. Rote information: okay; but for discussion (thinking aloud with others), the discussion forums (of which there were several) don't work that well. Too many threads for me. Too slow. This is not the fault of the participants, but of the medium. The comments that I did track where sound and worthwhile, but there were so many and so many different threads. It was an overload. 

As for content, I definitely got something out of the course. I'm going to post my two essays (peer-reviewed) below to give you an idea of what I took away. Each essay garnered some criticism for wandering too far from the questions posed and that seems fair. But I decided to write about what I could synthesize and take-away, not show off knowledge of what we learned in the course (not that I'm necessarily above that). Here's the first questions and essay:

Question 2: The Buddha makes the claim, which may draw some support from modern psychology, that the self does not exist. Describe the self that the Buddha says does not exist and explain the Buddha's principal argument against it. Do you agree or disagree with the Buddha’s argument that this kind of self doesn’t exist? Or are you unable to take a position? Give two specific reasons for your view, and explain your reasons support either the existence of the self or the non-existence of the self, or why they explain why you are unable to take a position on the question.

Question 2

Self or No-Self? Does it matter? An answer to the second question must come first. The Buddha told the tale of the man shot with an arrow. Do we first inquire about the arrow before treating the injury? Thus, Buddha deflected most metaphysical inquiry. Are we and the Buddha ignoring this teaching if we go down the rabbit-hole of the Self? While dangerous, the venture is necessary.

The doctrine of No-Self is important because it relates to the fundamental doctrines of impermanency and causality. The “unsatisfactoriness”  (dukkha) of life identified in the First Noble Truth stems from impermanency. Impermanency prompts humans to grasp at experience. If the Self is real and (implicitly) permanent in a way that other experience or objects are not, then we humans will cling to the Self as our anchor against misfortune. But if the Self is as impermanent as the rest of reality, then humans will have grasped in vain in the hope of negating suffering. Buddha’s deconstructs of the Self imagined by the Upanishads. He proposes instead the Five Skandhas (sheaths) as creating the illusion of a Self. Buddha formulates a self that is created and disbursed from moment to moment just like every other form of reality. We can’t cling (successfully) to what doesn’t exist.

While the Buddha’s formulation makes some sense, so does the formulation of the Upanishads. The atman (Self) exists outside of the particular manifestations of a person. The atman represents a Self behind the person. Given the sense of continuity that most humans enjoy, this makes intuitive sense. Whether we posit a Self like the Upanishads or we follow St. Augustine in finding that the seat of the soul [or mind] is in the memory, we experience a fundamental continuity that most humans enjoy and that identifies each person to himself (or herself) and to others. (E.B. White: “Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.”) It is this remembered self, along with the “I” (or Freudian ego), that marks our day-to-day lives. To what extent can the Buddha’s formulation alter or end these conceptions, and to what extent should it?

Consider the problem formulated by Heraclitus: can we step into the same river twice? To break down the question, are we concerned about the water, the place, or the function (moving water from here to there)? We may think of the self as a river, a channel of experiences that tends to follow the same course, although it changes from time to time—constantly but subtly most of the time; abruptly and drastically at other times. In the course of time, a river comes into being and disappears; so with this entity we call the self. Also, the No-Self doctrine reflects that a person, like the river, is not subject to a unitary command-and-control entity. Nature, in the form of winds, rains, animals, floods, droughts, etc., changes the river. So with humans: we have only limited control over our lives (our bodies, our thoughts, our consciousness) and in such a situation we cannot identify a Self to which we can give allegiance.

The No-Self doctrine challenges Buddhism internally because of the belief in karma and reincarnation. If there isn’t a Self, then what reaps the effects that constitute karma, especially those effects thought to extend beyond a lifetime? And how does reincarnation work if not via a Self? What entity acts to create karma and to reincarnate? For these answers, we return to doctrines of change (impermanence) and causality. Our No-Self is an aggregate of shifting patterns, and it creates a dharma moment-to-moment within its space-time locale. To extend the metaphor borrowed from Heraclitus, the perceived self is the river of that delivers the water (karma) downstream (a later time). Extending the metaphor even further, we can say that our younger self sends water (karma) downstream to our older self. Our image of the self is the river that appears to have continuity. But we know that the river dries up with old age, sickness, and death. Borrowing from Augustine again, we can see that memory—whether genetic material passed down over eons or the recollections of a younger self—provides the seeming and functional continuity that we experience. We can think of the functional self as a collection of habits. Like any habit, it comes into being (time), functions within a context, and then disappears, if for no other reason than death. Would Buddha disagree that we are a collection of habits that me may notice and change from time to time? Isn’t that the point of meditation? Therefore, we cultivate our meta-awareness to influence the channels of our life.

At the end of the course lectures I wrote the following in response to two questions posed: 

3. Does modern science lend support to the logic behind Buddhist meditation practice?

4. Does modern science lend support to the moral validity of Buddhism?

 Re: Questions 3&4

First, let's stipulate that "modern science" includes the systematic, empirically-based study of shared phenomena. To participate in science, one must share a vocabulary and a set of skills. In evaluating Buddhism in light of contemporary thinking, we should include not just evolutionary psychology, but all manner of contemporary science and philosophy. With this understanding in mind, we find a great deal of support for Buddhist contentions about meditation and morality.

Buddhism for our purposes posits some key points:

The doctrine of No-Self (interior) (anatman), supports the idea that we humans have no central command and control in our brains. Plato's tripartite division of the mind (the cultural manifestation of the brain) posits that Reason controls Will & Appetite. EP  (evolutionary psychology) & modular thinking in particular reject the existence of a command and control center in our brains (and in the self that appears to the outside world). Whether we focus on the modular model or (as I prefer), we focus on McGilchrist's account of the division of the hemispheres, we agree that our brains are not built (by natural selection) with a final, authoritative center to arbitrate and rule upon conflicts within the brain/mind. The modular and hemispheric models of the brain help resolve issues of self-deception (akrasia) and self-control that plague more "rational" models of human thinking. EP argues persuasively that the brain is an environment in which different needs and values compete for resources. Sometimes a perspective "wins"; sometimes it losses. (Think of RW's doughnuts.) We are not singular, unified decision-makers contra much of classical economic thinking. Much of neuroscience and contemporary psychology strongly supports the conclusion that we don't have an ultimate decision-making function and therefore an idea of our Self as singular, constant, and essential fails.

Emptiness/sunyata. The concept of emptiness (or nothingness or formlessness) counters the concept of essentialism, the idea of an unchanging essence lurking behind a phenomena. Buddhism posits that all of reality is the result of co-dependent origination, more process than substance. This perspective, based on a radical empiricism, is one that Buddhism shares with American pragmatism (no surprise that RW cites William James), process philosophy, and even quantum mechanics. Indeed, post-modernity as a cultural phenomena provides a view of the fluidity of reality (along with its share of nonsense).

The doctrine of No-Self (exterior) as Prof. Wright describes it involves a reduction of barriers between ourselves and the world "out there". This perspective sees a fundemental unity of reality. Reports of this perspective by the meditators RW interviewed seem common. As an outgrowth of meditation, which involves perceiving the mind as an impermanent and changing reality, alters our relation to the world in which we live. This melting away of distinctions based on verbal and conceptual habits gives way to a new, unencumbered sense of reality. Concepts are habits of mind that may have been (or that may remain) useful, but in a fundamental sense, we now appreciate them as arbitrary. The seemingly fundamental perspective of Self vs. Other fades away. This, too, jibes with the best contemporary thinking: we have gained a perspective during the course of modernity that our world (the earth) is not the center of the universe, that our species was not created specially by God (thank you, Darwin), and that even space and time are relative (not to mention th mind-boggling perpsectives of quantum theories and the like). These shifts in perspective, which meditation encourages, allows us to see the world in a new light. The "us vs. them" no longer holds as great a sway as it once did. More limited worldviews become less attractive because they become less believable. In this sense, the scientific (in the broad sense) study of meditation supports a new, wider view of morality.

We can now appreciate and transcend our evolutionary heritage, something that religious and (some) philosophical traditions have been seeking to do for several millenia, especially since the Axial Age. We now better understand the evolutionary pressures and mechanisms that affect human behavior and that in our current environment may prove counter-beneficial. Indeed, we humans may serve as the first conscious creators of human life and culture on earth--if we're very wise and very lucky (longshots). This has been a millennial dream--of heaven on earth--but we can move closer to it. Buddhism, as a praxis, a way of life and understanding, draws on centuries of radical empiricism and acute conceptual thinking to help humans lead better lives. Buddhist adepts are curators of a meditative practice based on recognized principles of practice. When we combine practices of meditation with deep investigation, we perceive the world much differently. Buddhists should continue to join with scientists, trained adepts in a different field of experience, to better guide humanity into our future. 

And on peer evaluations:  About one-half of the evaluations were of little value (minimal comment) and other half were about equally divided between praise and marked criticism. Thus, it's hard to gauge what I should be doing differently. Essays by others that I read were more direct in answering the questions, and I marked them high. On the other hand, I didn't perceive much original thought in them. Nevertheless, it's worth doing and an appropriately humbling exercise.