Specious Argument

Books written about our brains tend to be complex and hard to understand. The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity–and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race is different. It is easy to understand, entertaining, and informative. Those two qualities make this book (Amazon affiliate link) an outstanding read.

The main focus of the book is on one of the brain’s chemicals: dopamine.

Dopamine is a chemical that our brain uses when we want more of something now or focus more on abstract goals, needs, wants, or desires in the future.

As soon as we want something, our dopamine brain circuit kicks in and starts pumping dopamine, a feel-good drug. Dopamine remains as long as we are in pursuit of that something, but once we have obtained our goal, dopamine drops off and we need find something new to pursue to keep that dopamine high. If we are fortunate, though, our brains transition from dopamine to the Here and Now molecules.

Dopamine is one of the instigators of love, the source of the spark that sets off all that follows. But for love to continue beyond that stage, the nature of the love relationship has to change because the chemical symphony behind it changes. Dopamine isn’t the pleasure molecule, after all. It’s the anticipation molecule. To enjoy the things we have, as opposed to the things that are only possible, our brains must transition from future-oriented dopamine to present-oriented chemicals, a collection of neurotransmitters we call the Here and Now molecules, or the H&Ns. Most people have heard of the H&Ns. They include serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins (your brain’s version of morphine), and a class of chemicals called endocannabinoids (your brain’s version of marijuana). As opposed to the pleasure of anticipation via dopamine, these chemicals give us pleasure from sensation and emotion. In fact, one of the endocannabinoid molecules is called anandamide, named after a Sanskrit word that means joy, bliss, and delight.

According to anthropologist Helen Fisher, early or “passionate” love lasts only twelve to eighteen months. After that, for a couple to remain attached to one another, they need to develop a different sort of love called companionate love. Companionate love is mediated by the H&Ns because it involves experiences that are happening right here, right now—you’re with the one you love, so enjoy it.¹

Addictions, such as alcohol and drugs, trigger a dopamine release. The faster dopamine release, the more addictive the drug. Different drugs, of course, have different strengths and absorption rates. The addiction is caused by a chemical cultivation of desire or wanting. Whether this wanting is good or bad is irrelevant. And addiction should not be viewed through a moral lens of weak character or lack of willpower. Instead, it is a chemical addiction that is difficult from which to break.

Dopamine can make people act in strange ways. For example, although dopamine causes people to want more of everything, including power and domination, people can put aside their immediate desires for longer-range goals. By being more pleasant, people can often get more cooperation and work from others over the longer term.

Creative and mental illness often require abstract ideas, needs, wants, or goals. Dopamine figures prominently in both. And not surprising, mental illness afflicts a high percent of creative people compared to the general population. Various medications for mental illness seek to control the way dopamine works within the brain.

Scientists and artists have more in common than many believe.

The fine arts and the hard sciences have more in common than most people believe, because both are driven by dopamine. The poet composing lines about a hopeless lover is not so different from the physicist scribbling formulas about excited electrons. They both require the ability to look beyond the world of the senses into a deeper, more profound world of abstract ideas. Elite societies of scientists are filled with artistic souls. Members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences are one and a half times more likely to have an artistic hobby compared to the rest of us. Members of the U.K. Royal Society are about twice as likely, and Nobel Prize winners are almost three times as likely. The better you are at managing the most complex, abstract ideas, the more likely you are to be an artist.²

I found the discussion on politics interesting and complex, but I will let you, my kind reader, find out for yourself.

Not surprisingly, dopamine is also helpful for adventurers because they are not satisfied with the status quo of their current environment. The authors discuss how people migrated from Africa to across the globe and what role dopamine played.

In the last chapter, we learn that to be happy, people need to focus on the here and now, not the future. Therefore, to lead a happier life, we need to temper our insatiable hunger for more and learn to appreciate what we have now. In reality, we need both the drive and ambition that comes from dopamine to make progress, and we need to enjoy and appreciate what we have accomplished.

To reiterate, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.

One of my goals for the New Year is to read at least thirty books and write a brief book review afterward.

My reviews will typically only be a paragraph or two. To write longer, a more detailed book review requires a lot more effort. Once I have finished a book, I want to move on to the next one, not spend several hours writing a review.

Furthermore, I expect most of my ratings will be five stars. When reading, I am not looking for perfection or riveting information on every page. Instead, if I can come away with one good idea, something that I never knew before, or am forced to reevaluate a current belief or bias, then I will consider my time reading well spent. I got this idea of what constitutes success from Alex Honnold in a Harvard Business Review article “Life’s Work: An Interview with Alex Honnold.” Alex Honnold is the free solo climber who conquered the 3,000-foot ascent of El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park.

Is the way you train—memorizing and rehearsing your plan—typical?

Visualizing how you’re going to navigate a difficult section is pretty common. Where are my hands going to go? Where should I place my foot? Even recreational climbers in gyms make plans for themselves before they leave the ground. With free soloing, you’re both remembering or anticipating how to do certain climbs and trying to imagine the emotional component. What will it feel like to be up high in a crazy, contorted position without protection during a difficult stretch? When I’m not climbing, I spend most of my time reading books about training, psychology, and performance. If I get one good idea from one book, that’s a success.

As an aside, nonsubscribers to Harvard Business Review can read three articles, I believe, per month free of charge. So if Honnold’s interview piques your interest, head over to HBR to enjoy the article.

Also, sometimes when I read a book, I realize that I am not in the target audience. Even so, I keep reading because I might learn something interesting or helpful. And to penalize an author’s work by not giving a five-star rating just because I am not part of his target audience seems unfair.

My book reviews on my blog will be very similar, if not identical, to my reviews on Goodreads.

Although I was bullish last month, I did not provide a forecast for the month of December. And I am glad that I remained silent. Even though oil prices are up now, I was surprised that West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil prices hit the low $60s last month.

Looking forward to January, I am expecting that WTI oil prices will range between $72.50 and $82.50. There are still several unknowns and critical developments waiting to be resolved in the near future.

OPEC+ is scheduled to meet in early January. Given that prices are relatively strong, I expect OPEC+ to maintain its schedule of an increase of 400 thousand barrels per day in February. There are three major issues, however, that have the potential to affect the price of oil. First, Omicron is still surging across the world. From my reading, some expect the Omicron wave to crest in early January, and others expect, mid- to late-February. Second, Russia and the US and NATO allies are scheduled to meet in early January to hold talks. While I hold some personal opinions, I do not think the general public, including myself, has sufficient information to render an informed opinion. Both sides are engaged in propaganda efforts to sway their public to their side. I just hope that the outcome does not result in a further escalation. And third, the Iran negotiations are ongoing. Just like the Russia and US and NATO negotiations, I do not think the general public has sufficient information. Given that any of these three major issues has the potential to affect oil prices, I am going to be cautious and wait until there is more clarity.

During the past month, I found it interesting watching experts opine on the effects of Omicron. Generally speaking, I noticed that those who began with a negative outlook never deviated from their negativity. Similarly, those who began with a positive outlook never deviated. Although I should not be surprised, I am. I believe that these various experts wanted and believed that they were providing the most realistic and unbiased information available. Yet they always seemed to find and circulate evidence that supported their initial positions, which is, of course, a demonstration of confirmation bias. Because Omicron is so transmissible and information is evolving quickly, I tend to be more uncertain. I would not be surprised if something were released tomorrow that refutes my prior position.

What I just wrote about Omicron applies equally to negotiations, generally. Major negotiations are always difficult and are fraught with high degrees of uncertainty. The participants of those negotiations struggle to corral all the issues and data and present an acceptable solution to their respective leaderships. If even they are uncertain how the future will unfold, how can someone far removed be certain of an outcome?

Of course, once a resolution has been reached in any negotiation, pundits will claim that it was all foreseeable. They will point to the breadcrumbs that led to this obvious outcome. The reality is that the breadcrumbs can be rearranged to suit any outcome that develops. Looking back, pundits and historians will always find a path through the chaos that seems logical and deterministic—as if someone who applied themselves could have accurately predicted the outcome. I believe that narrative is false.

I am reminded of a passage in Michael Lewis’s book (Amazon affiliate link) The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds where he wrote the following:

It wasn’t just sports announcers and political pundits who radically revised their narratives, or shifted focus, so that their stories seemed to fit whatever had just happened in a game or an election. Historians imposed false order upon random events, too, probably without even realizing what they were doing. Amos had a phrase for this. “Creeping determinism,” he called it—and jotted in his notes one of its many costs: “He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

A false view of what has happened in the past makes it harder to see what might occur in the future. The historians in his audience of course prided themselves on their “ability” to construct, out of fragments of some past reality, explanatory narratives of events which made them seem, in retrospect, almost predictable. The only question that remained, once the historian had explained how and why some event had occurred, was why the people in his narrative had not seen what the historian could now see. “All the historians attended Amos’s talk,” recalled Biederman, “and they left ashen-faced.”¹

For those unfamiliar with the book, the friendship is between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize “for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.” If you have not read the book, I highly recommend it.

The key point is that the future is too uncertain to predict with certainty.

As mentioned, there is no consensus on what to expect regarding Omicron. On December 28, 2021, the New York Times featured a hopeful article “Omicron Variant Might Help Defend Against Delta, Lab Study Suggests” (subscription required).

If further experiments confirm these findings, they could suggest a less dire future for the pandemic. In the short term, Omicron is expected to create a surge of cases that will put a massive strain on economies and health care systems around the world. But in the longer term, the new research suggests that an Omicron-dominated world might experience fewer hospitalizations and deaths than one in which Delta continues to rage.

“Omicron is likely to push Delta out,” said Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, who led the new study. “Maybe pushing Delta out is actually a good thing, and we’re looking at something we can live with more easily and that will disrupt us less than the previous variants.”

At present, my biggest concern is how Omicron will play out over the next several weeks. Even so, I expect that the price of oil has already discounted much of the bad news from Omicron. So now we need to wait to see if the future unfolds as some of the more optimistic pundits hope.

Again, I expect WTI to range between $72.50 and $82.50 for January 2022.

I wish you a Happy New Year, good health, and safe travels if you are traveling.

My forecast for the November WTI price range was completely wrong because of at least three factors. First, the Biden administration was determined to reduce oil prices, either by having OPEC+ produce more oil or by coordinating with countries to withdraw oil from their respective strategic petroleum reserves. Having failed to convince OPEC+ to cooperate, oil will be released from strategic petroleum reserves of numerous countries, including the United States. Second, Austria went into lockdown because of its COVID situation. Some feared Austria might be the first domino in Europe. And third, last Friday, oil prices tanked on the WHO’s announcement of a new COVID variant named Omicron.

Later this week, OPEC+ will decide its production quotas for January. Many, including Morgan Stanley analysts, are expecting OPEC+ to pause its automatic 400 thousand barrel per day increase. Below is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal article “Oil Prices Stabilize After Omicron-Driven Friday Selloff” (subscription required) on November 29, 2021.

Crude’s recent volatility marks the latest big swing in energy markets sparked by worries that Covid-19 travel restrictions will weaken the global economy and sap demand for fuel. In the past 20 months, oil has frequently fallen sharply when new variants and travel restrictions emerge, only to later rebound when demand picks up and large producers instill confidence in their supply curtailments.

Some analysts expect a similar pattern to play out after scientists detected the new, fast-spreading Omicron variant in South Africa. While new travel restrictions could dent the recent recovery in fuel demand, some traders now expect the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies to delay projected supply increases.

“With uncertainty over Omicron, we expect that OPEC will shelve its target to increase output in January and keep its quota flat,” Morgan Stanley analysts said in a note.

Because of the uncertainty concerning Omicron, traders’ reaction to Omicron developments, and OPEC+’s upcoming decisions, I am not going to provide a forecast range for the next month. While I remain bullish, I would not be surprised if oil prices just eke up slightly during December or recover the entire Friday loss. Of course, oil prices could fall, and I would be completely wrong. So I am going to watch and wait.

I wish everyone good health, a happy holiday season, and safe travels, if traveling.