site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

40
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe nothing in the culture has really changed at all and it just feels different to me because I'm older now and paying attention to politics more than I used to. Then I'm confronted with strong evidence that no, it's not all in my head, something important really has changed in recent years.

The most recent such thing: Cyberchase. Cyberchase is a children's show that airs on PBS Kids that premiered in 2002. I have fond memories of it and it was probably the only PBS show that I was still willing to watch as a child even after I figured out how TV remotes worked and discovered Nickelodeon.

Cyberchase is focused on exposing children to mathematical concepts in a way that is entertaining enough to hold their attention and presented at a level they can grasp. The way each episode works is that the villain, Hacker, tries to hack the Motherboard (the AI that controls the computers that run "Cyberspace", i.e. the Internet) in some way every episode and three kids, Matt, Jackie, and Inez (ages 9-11) have to thwart him. Along the way, they learn about some mathematical concept that helps them stop Hacker.

My favorite episode is Season 2 episode 10, "Raising the Bar," which is about bar graphs. It has stuck in my memory all this time because it blew my child mind when I saw it the first time, and also because I think its lesson is one of the most important for everyone to know. Hacker impersonates an exterminator and releases bugs in a cyberspace library instead of killing them. The children suspect this when they discover an unusual number of bugs in one section of the library, and they create a bar graph to show the library administrator. But Hacker presents his own bar graph that suggests the bug problem is minimal in every section, which calms the administrator. The kids are stumped until they realize that Hacker had changed the scale on the Y-Axis and deliberately left off the labels in order to make all the bars look small. They point this out to the library administrator, finally convince her, and save the day. To this day, I still think of this Cyberchase episode when I see a misleading data visualization.

One thing I love about Cyberchase is its faith in young children's ability to grasp complex concepts if they're presented well. It airs on PBS Kids, which has a target audience of children ages 2-8 but sometimes addresses concepts that are not taught to average students until high school. The list of topics goes beyond more basic concepts like multiplication and fractions and includes algebra, growth by doubling (i.e. exponential growth), data prediction, probability, symmetry, and 3D geometry. In its most ambitious episodes, the show targeted at 8-year-olds introduces game theory by having the kids find a solution for Nim, and introduces mathematical proofs by having them prove that it's not possible to make a triangle out of any three rods.

In a children's programming landscape dominated by shows that only prioritize entertainment and in a country whose school system often stunts and demoralizes its most curious and motivated students, Cyberchase is a gem. It introduces complex concepts to children at a level they can understand, and it does so while remaining genuinely entertaining and funny. Probably it has sparked a curiosity in many children that their basic arithmetic lessons couldn't, and helped them to grasp complex concepts more quickly when they encountered them years later in school. Probably it has played a role in encouraging more people to enter STEM fields and help us build the future. I know it did for me. In short, it's a great kids show, in my opinion one of the best ever.

...Well, it was, anyway. The focus of Cyberchase has shifted since its inception in 2002. All of the episodes I've listed so far have been from the show's first 5 seasons, which aired from 2002-2007 and were the ones most focused on math lessons. In seasons 6-8 (2007-10), many of the episodes focused on uses of math in real-world contexts like sports and weather, still a very worthy topic IMO but less rigorous than the concept-heavy topics in the earlier seasons. After season 8 ended in 2010, the series when on a three year hiatus and returned with a new director (J. Meeka Stuart replaced Brandon Lloyd) for season 9 in 2013. This is where the focus of the series really shifted. In the first episode, "An Urchin Matter," the kids save a kelp-bed ecosystem by releasing the sea otters that Hacker has captured because the sea otters are a keystone species that keeps the ecosystem balanced by eating sea urchins. In the second episode, they build a bunch of solar panels to light a skate park after Hacker's minions sabotage the power plant. In the third, they need to clear a giant trash heap that threatens to break through a certain cybersite's dome.

I'm sure you've noticed the pattern. The goal of the new Cyberchase, under the direction of Stuart, is no longer primarily to teach kids math. Its goal is to teach kids to be environmentalists. You can look at all the episode titles on the list and see that from season 9 onward every episode is about environmentalism.

There's still some math content. The solar panel episode, for example, has several moments where the kids multiply two numbers together to decide how many solar panels they need. Here's the first such moment, and the second. But in the first scene, one of the characters just says the answer, and in the second, one of them literally uses a calculator. There's no explanation of how to multiply numbers together, and no deeper exploration of the topic. One could argue that the focus of this episode is multiplication, but it sure feels like a shoehorned-in afterthought to me. Compare that scene to this one from Season 1 episode 19 that actually explains how to multiply.

I watched other episodes of season 9 while researching this post and everything I saw is like this. They use some kind of math concept somewhere but don't really explain, and they quickly move on to get back to the environmentalism. It feels like the sort of thing you would do if you wanted to make a show about environmentalism but you were hired to make a show about math.

Later episodes seem to have gotten even lighter on the math. I watched all of season 11 episode 5 and there weren't even any moments like that, it was all about the kids building a wind mill.

A lot of the focus of new Cyberchase seems like relatively uncontroversial stuff about how recycling is good or invasive species are bad, and some of it is scientifically educational. Remarkably, I couldn't find any references to climate change or global warming. I don't agree with all of the messages, in particular I think its treatment of solar and wind energy is biased. But setting all that aside, my argument is not that environmentalism is bad or that kids shows about environmentalism are bad. My argument is that environmentalism is not what Cyberchase was supposed to be about. I would feel the same way if it was turned in a show dedicated to pushing a message I 100% agreed with. There's no denying that when the show restarted in 2013, it was a different show what it was in 2010. Probably it will still encourage some kids to enter STEM fields, especially biology and environmental science. But what it won't do is teach them math concepts in a way that will help them actually succeed in those fields, especially the math-heavier ones like physics. It also probably won't be as effective at creating intellectual curiosity in kids like me, who was fascinated with logic puzzles like Nim, but wouldn't have been as interested in a story about building a wind mill.

Some might say that after 8 years of teaching math, Cyberchase was out of math topics and needed to pivot to something else. I completely disagree. It might have exhausted the purest math topics, but there's loads of math-adjacent topics it has never touched on. They could have had age-appropriate episodes about programming, logic gates, electricity, opinion surveys, genetics (despite the show's recent focus on biology, it never touches on genetics), space, optics, magnets, the law of supply and demand, airplanes, and so many more things. The new show is focused almost entirely on environmental science and a little biology and ignores physics, chemistry, computer science, astronomy, economics, and statistics. You might say that doing all of those things would be too much and it had to pick one subject, but the show seems to have exhausted all of the topics in environmental science a while ago and become repetitive. There are three different episodes about building gardens, for example (s10e3, s12e4, s13e10), and three about trash (s9e3, s12e1, s13e7). Also, I don't think repeating math topics would have been that bad. Approaching the same topic from a slightly different angle might help some kids grasp it better than they did the first time. This doesn't really apply to the message "trash is bad," which everyone can pretty much get the first time.

I guess that’s all I have to say. Cyberchase was amazing and now it’s just okay, and I’m sad.

Very good post. I remembered watching Cyberchase as a kid but didn't remember it being so good... until you said that it was only the first 5 seasons or so. I had probably watched the later seasons (I remember an episode with the crux being reading the nutrition labels so the kids avoid drinking some harmful drink devised by Hacker, or something like that). How do I nominate a post for AAQC on this new site?

Report and say actually a quality contribution.