Most parenting manuals end up gathering dust on my bedside table, but Melinda Wenner Moyer’s Hello, Cruel World! isn’t one of them.

Hello, Cruel World!

The unfortunate thing about parenting books is that, in my experience, once you become a parent you are too time-poor and exhausted to read them. As a result, my bedside table is stacked with parenting manuals of which I’ve read the first five pages a dozen times before passing out. If this sounds like you, the latest book by science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer should be top of your pile.

We mostly breathe subconsciously, but columnist Helen Thomson finds evidence that the brain functions differently when inhaling or exhaling, or breathing through your nose or mouth.

When my kids get nervous or are having a meltdown, I instinctively tell them to take a deep breath. It’s a reflex that I know innately feels good during a moment of panic or before a big presentation. But new evidence suggests breathing does more than just oxygenate the body – it fundamentally changes our brain, decreasing anxiety, sharpening our senses and enhancing our ability to perform. Those breakthroughs have left me wondering: could I improve my day, just by using my breath better?

These are all valid! But it’s very important to be clear about which one you’re using. Because here’s something that happens a lot.

There are lots of reasons you might do this.

1. Pure prior: The idea sounds stupid and you haven’t looked at the argument.
2. You’ve looked at the argument, but you think it’s wrong.
3. You looked at the argument, but then realized you don’t have the background to understand it, so you went back to your prior.
4. You looked at the argument, you do understand it, and it looks pretty good. But your prior is so strong you still reject the idea anyway.
5. You looked at the argument, you understand it, it seems strong, and on an intellectual level, it overcomes your prior. But somehow you just aren’t able to get emotionally invested in the conclusion. (Sometimes I feel this way about AI risk.)

If you think about it, almost everything you know comes from other people. Even when you “check the facts” what that usually means is “see what other people say”. If you trace your knowledge back to observations in the world, it’s a huge graph of you trusting people who trust other people who trust other people.

Understanding the world is a social process. This is important because I don’t think the tension of weird ideas can be resolved at an individual level. You’ve got finite time to investigate crackpot theories. But fortunately, you don’t need to resolve all questions yourself. We just need to follow habits that lead to us collectively identifying good ideas and discarding bad ones.