Douglas Adams asked the question satirically, sent a civilization on a 7.5 million year errand to answer it, and delivered a punchline that has aged better than most philosophy: the answer was fine, but the question was never properly stated. His joke is doing a lot of heavy lifting and I think I could begin to see it in high school, though admittedly without quite feeling the weight of it. Most people who ask what the point of it all is are not actually short of answers, they are short of a question precise enough to be answered, and they mistake the resulting fog for a verdict about the universe rather than a problem with the phrasing.

So I want to state the question properly, and then give my answer, which is not satirical and which I have only previously relayed at dinner gatherings, sometimes hoping for an early excuse to leave and sometimes finding genuinely interesting people who enjoy my answer. It goes without saying that not everyone will agree with it, even if they did enjoy it, which is why “meaning is a sweater we must each knit for ourselves” holds true no matter what meaning you believe your life has. Mind you, though this article isn’t prescriptive, it is applicable to anyone capable of reading it (foreshadowing).

Three questions wearing the same coat

Why am I here? What is the point? Why should I remain alive?

These get asked as though they were 3 separate problems, and they plague people from every walk of life, but at least to my mind, they are the same question asked at 3 different temperatures. The first is asked in curiosity, usually late at night in boredom when something in the mind clicks. The second is asked in frustration, generally somewhere around the fourth consecutive year of doing something you do not care about for money you spend on things that do not help you find meaning. The third is asked in an emergency, and I’ll come back to it at the end because it deserves better than to be lumped in and forgotten, which sadly is all too often the case.

The apparent supply of answers is enormous. Jordan Peterson has one of the more practical, and to put it less charitably than he does and more charitably than I would like to: the question is a symptom of surplus. We have leisure our ancestors never had, we are having fewer children later or not at all, and if you were exhausted by the demands of dependents you would not have the spare cycles to wonder what any of it is for. Have kids, and the answer will be screaming at you from a highchair at 6 in the morning. “I’m here for them, my offspring”, and indeed, many people in the depths of despair are brought out of such horrendously uncomfortable despair by the unconditional love they feel for their children, leading to the obvious conclusion that their child(ren) is/are their raison d’être.

The uncomfortable part of his somewhat crude but highly practical answer is that he is not entirely wrong about the mechanism or the reason why we are plagued by the question. Obligation genuinely does crowd out the question, and people with a great deal of unstructured time and very little that depends on them do report the vertigo of existentialism more often. Where it fails is that it answers by substitution rather than by argument. It does not tell you what the point is, it tells you how to be too busy to ask. It is also unavailable to a great many people through no decision of their own, and it silently relocates the problem one generation downward, because in 25 years the answer in the highchair is going to sit you down and ask why they are here, and “have your own” is a pyramid scheme of meaning. Later, I’ll take the same components and flip them on their head so as to demonstrate the importance, because if life has inherent meaning, then having children inherently offers them meaning, perhaps even furthering your own… More on that later.

Then there is faith, which is the majority answer worldwide, and try not to sneer at it here if you’re an atheist, partly because sneering is lazy and partly because a good number of people arrive at it through an experience of such profundity, elevation, insight, or apparent magic that refusal is not really available to them afterward. I will say plainly that this is not far removed, mechanically, from ergot poisoning or a heroic dose of psilocybin. And, that without evidence and reproducibility nothing can be assured to exist, thus believing something on no evidence sits in direct contradiction with the epistemic machinery that produced our entire civilization and risks dismantling the society that gave us nuclear weapons and social media… Right. On second thought, perhaps we should not cast faith into the fire quite so hastily.

Reason is not the safe harbour either

I am a man of reason, but I am also a reasonable man, and it would be foolish of me not to concede that logic and reason have their caveats and their shortcomings.

To have intelligence is to have the capacity for madness in exactly the same way it is the capacity for stability, and the same instrument produces both. The story many people reach for here is Nietzsche in Turin on January 3rd 1889, throwing his arms around a horse being flogged in the Piazza Carlo Alberto and collapsing into 11 years of silence. In this tale, he is undone by an empathy so acute that he perceived the whole scaffolding of unjust suffering for all the beasts of burden at once and could not survive the perception he gained. So says the book: If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity, by Justin Gregg.

It is a magnificent story, truly heartfelt, but alas I am fairly sure it did not happen that way. The sole original source is an interview an anonymous journalist conducted with Nietzsche’s landlord in 1900, fully 11 years after the fact (coincidental number I see), relaying what a nameless police officer had told him, which makes one of the most cited anecdotes in modern philosophy thirdhand hearsay of a scene that bears a suspicious resemblance to one in Dostoevsky, an author Nietzsche revered. Most biographers attribute his collapse to organic causes, whether syphilitic paresis or, on Leonard Sax’s 2003 argument in the Journal of Medical Biography, a slow-growing tumour.

Keep the story anyway, I say. The horse is a myth we invented and then could not stop retelling, and the reason we cannot stop is that we badly want it to be possible for a mind to break from seeing too clearly rather than from the growth of a lesion. We are a species that finds moral perception so plausible a cause of destruction that we will keep a story alive for 130 years on no evidence at all rather than accept a tumour. Irony indeed that this story is based purely in faith, especially for a man who viewed faith not as a virtue, but as a psychological defect and a defence mechanism against reality. Poor Nietzsche.

And yet, intellect has produced violence at scales no other faculty could reach, engineered famine, industrialized killing, and misinformation campaigns fine-tuned by people with doctorates.

Intellect also somehow fails to do the one job everybody assumes it does, and here I can stop gesticulating and instead point at actual data. In 2017 Caitlin Drummond and Baruch Fischhoff published an analysis in PNAS called “Individuals with greater science literacy and education have more polarized beliefs on controversial science topics”, drawing on General Social Survey responses across 6 contested scientific issues, and found that wherever American opinion had already split along political or religious lines, the split was wider among people with more general education, wider among people with more science education, and wider again among people who scored highest on a test of scientific literacy. On stem cell research, the Big Bang, human evolution, and climate change, more knowledge meant more polarization rather than less. Sigh.

Only on genetically modified foods and nanotechnology, which were contested at the time on other grounds and had not yet been claimed by anybody’s identity, did the effect vanish. Education produced no position of its own on those, because there was no tribal position available for it to sharpen. In short, knowledge did not supply the conclusion, it supplied the ammunition, and only on the topics where somebody had already declared war. So terrible a weapon, is the intellect, even against itself.

The authors offer 2 explanations for this: The first is motivated reasoning, where better educated people are simply more skilled at assembling a case for a conclusion they reached by other means. The second is miscalibration, where knowledge inflates confidence faster than it inflates knowledge. Ever hear of Dunning-Kruger? Look that one up. Neither is flattering and both are probably running at once.

The study has its limits and I have parked them in the appendix rather than clutter this up, since being clever about evidence is not the same as being careful with it and I would prefer to be caught (what’s the opposite of red-handed?) doing the second one. What the study establishes is enough for me, which is that the deficit model we often point to is finished. That reassuring notion where people reject the evidence only because they have not seen enough of it and would come round given a better pamphlet. But it doesn’t survive contact with the numbers, sadly, and I think by 2026 most environmental activists have finally come to realize this. There is a particular flavour of disappointment in watching a peer reviewed journal confirm something you already learned the hard way at a folding table outside a grocery store. Starts to make you think that “faith” stuff might be worth investigating, having taken over the planet ideologically for several millennia.

There is one hopeful finding in that paper, though. On every issue they examined, the people most likely to accept the scientific consensus were the ones who trusted the scientific community, and that trust did not interact with education or identity at all. It sat outside the fight entirely, doing its own work while every other variable in the model threw punches. Knowledge arms whoever already had a side. Trust decides which side they are standing on. And trust cannot be won in an afternoon with a good graph, it is earned by institutions behaving decently over decades, which is exactly what we have worked against through a combination of systemic rot and corrupt or incompetent leadership. Cynicism doesn’t manifest out of nowhere, as I have argued at length elsewhere on this blog, it gets manufactured, and lately we have been running the factory at capacity.

Donald Trump’s most effective backers are not the caricature we smug Canadians would like them to be. They include billionaires, physicians, researchers, and tenured academics, which is an awkward fact for anyone who has been treating the whole phenomenon as an American education system failure. Not that I wish to argue which tribe has the higher average IQ, which would be a stupid claim and a boring one, not least because plenty of Canadians already look down at his supporters from a height they haven’t earned. The billionaires are mostly there for the money, which is at least legible. The credentialed ones are the interesting case, because they are precisely the people that 2017 study is describing, better equipped than anybody in the room to build an airtight case for a conclusion they arrived at some other way entirely.

And you know, I see the mirror image on my own side of the aisle. British Columbia’s loudest left voting activists demand progress while treating measurement as a hostile act, and advocating for some form of libertarianism where no one can be told what to do yet all must bow before the noble social rules. Very intelligent people, saying and sincerely believing very foolish things, in both official languages no less. Only time will tell whether a reckoning can take place in my beautiful homeland.

Speaking of reckoning, I cannot stand here and tell you that faith is foolish and reason is the reliable road to meaning. At the end of the day, both roads have body counts. What I can tell you is where I ended up, which is in philosophy, a room with space enough for faith at the periphery, which is to say I am leaning on the parts most working philosophers would call the load-bearing walls.

What we actually are

My answer to the ultimate question starts from what kind of thing a human being is, and this is where people usually reach for a rock to throw, so let me first just say we’re talking about magnitude here.

Any environmentalist hopes that we will one day protect the rights of animals, who are only recently receiving formal recognition for consciousness at all, and I count myself firmly among them. The evidence there, is better than most people realize. Octopuses avoid places where they have previously been hurt. Bees roll wooden balls around for no reward anybody has been able to identify, which is a technical description of playing. Elephants give each other names (true fact). Something is home in there, and I want that on the record before the next part, because the next part kinda depends on fellow environmentalists not flipping out.

No corvid derives orbital mechanics. No dolphin holds a position on the trolley problem, or has any inkling that there is one. No octopus has read something written by an octopus 200 years dead and revised its conduct accordingly. Nothing else on this planet builds an instrument to detect a class of object it worked out mathematically before it had ever observed one. Nothing else sits in a room asking why it is here, gets a bad answer, and remains troubled by the “badness” of that answer for the next 30 years.

So when somebody points out corvids or dolphins and says we do not yet know what they are capable of thinking, that objection can only travel so far. It is a live and serious question about degrees, being actively asked by the scientific community, and it will keep producing results that no doubt surprise us. It is not a question about kind, and the gap it would have to close is not measured in decimal places, ok?

What is ours, on the evidence currently available, is the compound rather than any single ingredient. We are conscious of being conscious. We can render an interior state of mind into language precise enough that a stranger 4,000 kilometres and 200 years away can reconstruct it. We accumulate what we learn across generations instead of starting over each time. We can model a future we will not live to see, and then act on the model at planetary scale. A crow is perhaps somebody in the near legal future, and as an environmentalist, I would like that somebody left alone. But a crow cannot read an ice core, work out what its great-grandchildren will inherit, and change a policy shaping the future of the planet. At best it can tell its grandchildren: “Hey see that bi-pedal jerk over there with the green eyes and red beard? Yeah he stole eggs from Jerry and Sue’s nest, make sure to steal his food and poop on his head for time immemorial”. Also a true fact, thanks University of Michigan.

That compound is the whole ballgame, and it cuts in a direction that some people choose to ignore, usually out of a wish for nature to be secretly more capable than us, which I suspect comes from a decent instinct badly aimed. I have more sympathy for that position than this paragraph suggests, but I think it has the logic backwards. Every other creature on this planet is exempt on the grounds that it cannot know better. We are the only species that has ever been in a position to know better, which makes us the only species that can be held responsible, and responsibility is the price of the faculties we have rather than the reward for having them.

And we truly are unlikely. Not poetically unlikely, statistically unlikely: the improbability of abiogenesis, of eukaryotes, of an oxygenated atmosphere, of 5 mass extinctions that each cleared the board without sterilizing it, of a large stabilizing moon acting as a meteor shield, of a magnetic field warding off solar radiation, and of a primate lineage that survived a bottleneck. We look and even shout at a sky containing several hundred billion stars in this galaxy alone and hear nothing back, and whatever else the silence means, it means the odds against this are steeper than they look from inside a warm room.

Extreme improbability is not usually treated as a moral fact. I think it is one. An outcome this unlikely, in possession of faculties this rare, does not get to treat itself as disposable.

The answer

Here it is, deliberately short, because an answer to this question that requires a book is not an answer, it’s a hobby.

The meaning of my existence is to experience life in as many facets as are humanly possible, while causing the greatest benefit and the least harm to other humans and the other living things fortunate enough to be here at the same time.

That is it. It’s not rigid, any person alive can employ it, and it should look obvious in hindsight, which I consider a feature rather than a weakness, since an answer to the oldest question in the species that perhaps nobody had thought of before is far more likely to be wrong than profound.

Two clauses, and then one thing that follows from them.

Experience is the primary term because it is the only thing our faculties are actually for. Perception, memory, curiosity, grief, awe, boredom, the specific feeling of a cold morning on a mountain ridge at 6am with 4 hours of ascent behind you: these are not decoration on top of some more serious purpose, they are the purpose, and a life optimized to minimize experience in exchange for security or entertainment has traded the thing itself for the packaging.

Least harm is not a politeness appended to the first clause, it follows directly from it. If I value my own capacity to experience, and I concede that other creatures possess versions of that capacity, then I cannot coherently treat mine as sacred and theirs as free. We would not have evolved without them, we are made out of the same 4 billion year experiment, and if we are entitled to admire, respect, and love ourselves for what we are, we owe them the nearest equivalent we can manage.

It also runs inward, which is the direction people skip. If I value and respect the experience of others, I cannot exempt my own from the same protection, and whether the harm is physical or emotional is indistinguishable, because each is valid and each should be nurtured. That is the uncomfortable consequence I promised earlier. Under my own framework, giving up on yourself is a harm like any other harm, and the fact that you are the only person in the room when it happens does not privatize it. You are one of a vanishingly small number of instruments the universe has for noticing itself, and taking one of them offline is a real loss to everything I have spent this entire post describing.

None of which I say sternly, because moral language is the last thing a person in that state needs more of, and it tends to arrive from people who have never been anywhere near it. Suicide stopped being a crime in Canada in 1972, and across most of the world around the same period, which was the correct decision and a decent one, since the alternative was prosecuting somebody for having survived the worst day of their life. What I am describing is not guilt, it is worth, and the distinction matters a great deal, because the person contemplating self destruction has almost always undercounted themselves by an enormous margin, and I’ll spend some time discussing that in the third question at the end.

I make one exception, and it is the exception Canadian law already makes. If you are suffering from an incurable condition, including the extremely common and universally fatal one known as aging, and a medical professional has assessed you as end of life, I consider that assessment entirely sufficient to release you from the obligation. Experience has a floor, and nobody is required to remain below it for the convenience of my philosophy.

Beyond those 2 clauses there is a third obligation, which is owed to nobody currently alive: to keep expressing, learning, growing, supporting others, and, to whatever extent we can spare from the primary duties, to extend our reach past what we are currently capable of, so that future generations of every species inherit a larger capacity to experience the universe than we did.

What it costs

An answer with no consequences is a mood, so here are the consequences, including the ones I expect people to not like:

The first is that this framework grants no permission to harm anything that can suffer, and I want to keep that in ethics for now rather than handing it to justice, because the moment we appoint an authority to attach penalties we start arguing about the penalties instead of the principle, and the principle is what is really in dispute here.

The second consequence is that we owe it to ourselves to protect this planet, and we owe it to ourselves and to every other living thing to leave it one day. (Here we go)

Our planet is under quarantine. The vacuum, the gravity well, and the atmosphere hold us here, and they have held every living thing here for the entire history of life as we know it, which is a hell of an attendance record. Space is enormous and the universe is indifferent and chaotic, and on a long enough timeline the sun expands to consume the Earth, and on a shorter and much less predictable timeline a huge rock arrives with our name on it, having travelled for 4 billion years with the specific intention of ruining one particular Tuesday. Our improbable streak carries no guarantee of continuation, and the fossil record is unambiguous that this planet has ended the run of far more successful and far longer-tenured species than ours.

As the only creatures currently capable of this degree of self-awareness, and the only ones who can see the asteroid coming and do something about it, we have a moral obligation to persist, and to carry life to other places. Not to turn every rock into a second Earth, and not because a Martian suburb is inherently valuable, but so that a single bad afternoon in the inner solar system cannot end the only known instance of the universe’s self awareness, emotional capacity, and ability to create.

We are the living, breathing, feeling embodiment of the universe. To extinguish humanity is to remove the brain and the heart of the universe. To sterilize this planet is to take out its lungs and its blood. Or, as my favourite astronomer put it rather more economically, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself, which was a considerable personal disappointment to arrive at independently this year only to discover Carl had beaten me to it by 4 decades and in a quarter of the words. To let species vanish by the thousand is to confiscate, from every generation that follows, the chance to experience what was here, and yes, evolution continues and no, we have no way to freeze an ecosystem in place and we would be naive to wish for it, but a mass extinction narrows the range of futures available to everything that comes after. It should thrill people to do the precise opposite of climate change, to carry life somewhere new and watch what it becomes over a few million years without us managing it.

The objection is that this is a rich man’s escape hatch, a licence to write off Earth while a rocket company bills the public for the privilege, and that every prominent advocate of it has a yacht. Or a Super Yacht, to be precise.

The objection is correct about the people who made the idea fashionable but quite wrong about the idea. A species that cannot maintain one thoroughly habitable planet, delivered to it free of charge with breathable air, liquid water, a magnetic field, a stable climate, and 4 billion years of accumulated soil, has offered no evidence whatsoever that it could construct a second one from scratch on a sterile rock possessing none of those things. The competence required to terraform Mars is the same competence as not wrecking Earth, practised under vastly worse conditions with no margin and no atmosphere to hide the errors in. If you want the second planet, you have to become the kind of civilization that deserved the first one.

Faith and cynics

There are many routes to a destination like this one, and if yours runs through faith then my optimism about the future may simply be your confidence that it resolves according to a plan. It’s not really in my interest to convince anyone otherwise, and it would likely be a waste of time at the risk of offending people whom I would otherwise have absolutely no need to quarrel with.

However, I take serious issue with the specific form of faith that dissolves individual responsibility, the version where it is all in [God’s] hands and therefore not in mine. I take exactly the same issue, from the opposite direction, with the fashionable apathy of the modern cynic about climate, the shrug that says nothing an individual does registers. Both are responsibility shedding dressed as wisdom, and both are wrong about the same mechanism, because change happens collectively, not systemically. Systems aren’t agents; they have no interests, they feel no embarrassment, and they have never once reformed themselves while nobody was pushing. Every systemic change has begun as a collective one first, and collective is a word made entirely out of individuals who each decided their own contribution counted.

Whatever route you take, if you believe there is any probability of a future for this species or this planet, that belief comes attached to a personal responsibility to live in a way that treats experiencing the universe and its life as a core tenet.

The third question

I said I would come back to it.

“Why should I remain alive?” is the only one of the 3 that ever gets asked in an emergency, and every framework of the kind I have just built has a bad habit of answering the first 2 beautifully and leaving the third standing in the hallway. Worse, most of the popular answers actively fail the people asking it, because they define a meaningful life as one that achieved something. That definition is perfectly comfortable if your life had the room for it. It is despair inducing if you have lived under difficult circumstances, circumstances you may not be able to explain and may privately suspect have more to do with you than with the world around you, and you read a sentence like that one moments before realizing that much of your life has amounted to battling those circumstances rather than producing anything a stranger would recognize as a concrete achievement.

The universe is chaotic and thoroughly indifferent, the systems we’ve built inside it distribute their damage unevenly and with no interest whatsoever in who deserved it, and the result is that illness arrives without cause, poverty compounds on itself, and a great many people spend 30 years getting up in the morning against a headwind nobody else in the room can feel, arriving at the end of it with no house, no title, and nothing anyone would call an achievement.

What they do have is 30 years of getting up in the morning, and I’m not offering that as a consolation prize awarded for effort, I’m saying it counts, because the standard I set out was never production. It was experience, and the reduction of harm wherever you could manage it, and anybody who kept going under a load like that has been doing both of those continuously and at a cost most people will never be asked to pay. If you’ve spent your life fighting a system, or an illness, or your own mental health, then you’ve been participating in the only project I think we have, and the fact that nobody ever issued you a receipt for it says a great deal more about our receipts than it says about your life.

None of this requires you to have done anything yet, because the meaning I’ve described is experience and the reduction of harm, and neither of those carries an entry requirement, a résumé, or a deadline. A life that consisted of noticing things and being kind about them would satisfy this entire framework without producing a single item worth putting on a headstone.

The obligation runs in both directions, because when I said we owe the greatest benefit and the least harm to the other people who happen to be here at the same time, you were always among the people being owed it, and on the days you can’t hold up your end it becomes somebody else’s turn to hold up yours. That’s the arrangement, and it only works if you tell someone. You aren’t required to have an answer available at all times, only to still be in the room when one turns up. As modern mental health practitioners put it rather more eloquently, we are all temporarily able bodied and we will all eventually become disabled, or to put it crudely, to begin with a diaper and end with a diaper is the most common sign of a life long lived…

Everyone who says they want to live meaningfully usually means they want their life to have achieved something. The destination is a long, varied, emotional, and unmistakably human experience, because that is the material we are made of and there is nothing else on offer.

Conclusion: a word on Stoicism and so-called stoics

Let’s end by separating 2 things that share a name and share almost nothing else, because I am about to be rude to one of them and I would rather not be rude to the wrong one. Clears throat for finale.

Stoicism, the philosophy, the actual one, running from Zeno through Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius writing notes to himself on campaign that he never intended anybody to read, is a discipline about the judgments you attach to events. If you really paid attention to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and deeply sat with it, you’d know that it does not tell you to feel nothing. It tells you that your suffering is generated substantially by the story you wrap around a circumstance rather than by the circumstance, which is a claim modern cognitive behavioural therapy took seriously enough to build a whole freaking treatment around. Marcus writes about grief. Seneca writes about grief at length and recommends against wallowing while visibly wallowing. That tradition would endorse most of what I have written here, and frankly I encourage it.

Then there is stoicism the posture, lowercase, sold in podcast advertisements to men who have not phoned their fathers in 6 years. It arrives as a discipline and functions as an anaesthetic, it takes a philosophy about examining your reactions and sells it as permission never to have any, and it is very popular with people who have mistaken numbness for control. Whoever is running that programme is going to come face to face with their own heart eventually, at a funeral or a diagnosis or 3am on an ordinary Tuesday for no reason at all, and one of the two of you is going to break. Just ask the man, the myth, the legend: Nietzsche. Fake horse whipping story and all.

The true philosophy tells you to look at the feeling clearly. The posture tells you the feeling is beneath you. Only one of those is compatible with a life whose entire point is experience, and the ancients picked the right one.

That is the meaning of life. Do not refuse it, do not ignore it, and do not wait until you have earned it. The live in live laugh love was always the instruction, and the instruction was experience.

Appendix

Two things I moved down here so the essay upstairs could keep its shape.

Appendix A: on animal consciousness

The formal recognition I referred to has a paper trail. In 2012 a group of neuroscientists issued the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference. In April 2024 an initial 40 scientists and philosophers, including Anil Seth, Christof Koch, and David Chalmers, launched the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness at NYU, and it has since gathered hundreds of signatures. Its position is that there is strong scientific support for conscious experience in other mammals and in birds, a realistic possibility of it in all vertebrates and in many invertebrates including cephalopods, decapod crustaceans, and insects, and that certainty about consciousness should not be a precondition for taking welfare risks seriously.

That last clause is the one doing the legal work, or trying to. Environmentalists have argued for decades that we should not have to prove a creature suffers before we stop hurting it, and the declarations exist largely because that argument keeps losing without a letterhead behind it. Whether any of this eventually produces enforceable protection is an open question, and I am not optimistic about the timeline.

I should also say something kinder about the position I brushed past in the main text. A great many environmentalists want nature to be secretly cleverer than us, and I understand the instinct completely. It comes from watching ecosystems maintain balances that we cannot replicate with a supercomputer, and from a well earned revulsion at human arrogance, which has justified an enormous amount of destruction while claiming the moral high ground. I have sat across from people making that argument in complete sympathy with where it comes from. I still think it has the ledger backwards, because the version where we are just another clever animal is the version where we are exempt, and I am not willing to hand us that exemption. It is folly to deny what makes us unique and it is ignorant of the consequences.

Appendix B: where the study is soft

The Drummond and Fischhoff paper is correlational. It draws on American General Social Survey data from 2006 and 2010, several of the belief questions are double-barrelled or awkwardly worded, the climate change item had a small sample, and the authors state plainly that whether education actually causes the polarization remains unresolved. American results also may not generalize to Canada, which has a different relationship between religious identity and science than the United States does.

None of that overturns the pattern, which is consistent across 4 separate issues and 3 separate measures of education, but it does mean the paper supports a modest claim rather than a sweeping one. The modest claim is the only one I needed: more knowledge does not reliably reduce identity-driven disagreement, and may sharpen it. Anybody who tells you the study proves education makes people stupid has read a headline rather than the paper, which is, when you think about it, a fairly on-the-nose demonstration of the finding.

Drummond, C. and Fischhoff, B. (2017). Individuals with greater science literacy and education have more polarized beliefs on controversial science topics. PNAS 114(36), 9587-9592. doi:10.1073/pnas.1704882114