Tinder: THESE are the people in your neighborhood

there was a song I used to hear all the
time as a kid these are the people in your neighborhood you may take it for granted that you know the people in your neighborhood that you have a sense of the cross-section of the society or living and or at the particular city or town you're living in but you don't one of the most powerful sources of bias for us to overcome in the social sciences is that bias of only paying attention to people we find interesting maybe you went to the grocery store today who do you remember seeing at the grocery store or who do you remember speaking to at the grocery store if you spoke to a couple of evil you will only remember the people you found interesting and you may not even be aware of it but you will be avoiding looking at avoiding making eye contact with and avoiding talking to Murie at other people for myriad other reasons including you find them ugly you find them culturally alien shall we say that there's some barrier between you and them that makes you think or assume they're just not the kind of person you'd want to talk to using the app tinder forces you to really see the faces of the people in your neighborhood in a survey even if you only look at these people for one half of one second before pressing the red X to say you're not interested you are seeing who these people are and perhaps not the lifestyle they actually lead but the lifestyle that they choose to present to you and to present at the public with pride when the reality is in our day to day lives there were all kinds of people were ignoring all the time I may not think that the sample of society engaging with is tremendously biased but where do I actually spend my time at the library specifically the University Library we used to I mean the gym I go do it's not a cross-section Society at all people went to our old gym here they weren't even average amongst bodybuilders or athletes they were really peculiar people at her gym you know some of them professional models some of them bodybuilding competitors but like you look around that gym these are not fit this is not average people to say no and even if there are average people going to my grocery store I don't notice them that's not who I talk to and I do I interact with the one who makes an impression on me where I don't even look in their faces for that one half of a second that you would on tinder and then beyond that if you just think about the location of the grocery store of course there's bias even if we don't mean to I mean think about how much more I have in common with the other people who choose to live in this apartment building just just the the factors that go into that so I should when we were at the grocery store one of the women at the checkout desk she asked about where we were living and referred to it as a very expensive place to live and I said to her oh well actually this is how much the rent is and she revealed she was you know she was checking out the grocery she were through she was paying more rent than we do she lives out in the suburbs right but there's a choice there do you live downtown did you live in the suburbs the different trade-offs the advantage of disadvantages of that right we want to live as pedestrians we don't want to own a car we don't want to park a car some people in the suburbs it the opposite we're willing to tolerate being around homeless people and drug addicts on the street every day there were a lot of people in suburbs who want to avoid that of course they're also issues like racism and multiculturalism are you comfortable being around you know people who don't speak English as their first language and so no do you want to retreat to a predominantly white suburb right in all my years it's not that many years but in all my years living in City of Victoria I never saw or spoke to or interacted with someone who owned a rifle who went shooting and then the minute you start up tinder you're you're all those people and there that's what they're showing off to you they're showing it with sometimes you know it's them also wearing human clothes but these are the people who go to the rifle range and where are those people they're here they're there they're ever they surround me in in my daily life and I'm ignoring them and they're ignoring me i I've never met or interacted with anyone here who does paintball hey this if you're not an english-speaking white Canadian I think it's fair to say paintball is stereotypically a bit of a redneck sport I think the type of people I meet in the Department of Political Science at my University in the Department of History in the Department of Asian Studies they don't they don't play paintball and they may do things that are way nerdy or and dorky or and more void of time I met a lot of people who watch Japanese cartoons as adults I met a lot of people at the University or into Japanese cartoons and Japanese pornography and all kinds of stuff oh I don't I don't think paintball is bad or evil it's just stereotypically it's associated with a certain demographic with a certain set of religious views look let's be real here in Victoria have I ever met and spoken to anyone who wanted abortion to be illegal you know which is now like the litmus test for the Republican Party United States or the hard conservatives in Canada saying I it's not just that it hasn't come up in conversation I think really I've never met or interact with those people and back when I was at the University of Toronto many years ago you guys have heard me complain like the political spectrum of people I encounter at the University of Toronto went from left-wing to communist like I didn't even meet moderate or centered ever didn't meet or after school but but but again this is the fundamental thing with the social sciences if some of those people were there maybe not intentionally I was avoiding them and they weren't avoiding me so you know when you deal with pollsters deal people asking questions for polls people doing serious social science research you might sometimes be annoyed that they don't easily give up you know if they've actually come to your door knocking door and said look we're here doing a poll about water quality that's an example where you know governments and clients pay big let's say look we want to come housing tests the tap water and you say well I can't do it why don't you go test the guys next door I'm busy whatever your reason that's and they really say no like we got to come back well you know we can't do it next door we have to and you say well what do you mean you guys are testing every seventh house or you know a random number house it's like no no but you're the random number right because if you don't if you don't stick to it if you don't stick to the randomness then you start getting water samples that are only from people who aren't busy right it's oh so you got water samples but they're all from people who are retired and who are at home between 3:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. when you were knocking on the door and they're the type of people who don't refuse to let you in no you can't let that bias creep in we even had a controversy this is when I was doing social science research in Cambodia some people like the spin the stick method of random house selection where you take a stick and spin it and say okay we'll go and ask of that house and it's pointed out no there's bias because you're more likely to choose larger houses right if there are small houses of arche houses right and when you have upstairs Downstairs situations well the stick never points at the second floor it only points at the gravel with these are these are really stiff so even I mean randomness is not a great method of taking a sample as what you want to do but when you're serious about these things the social sciences you always have to challenge like you know if you're doing research and even people like well I don't want to interview people who seem kind of crazy or seem like they're on drugs or seem hostile or sounds like no no because if you refuse to interview this person refused to include them in the sample for that reason you know so just say many years ago I used a different dating app I don't think I remember the name it's best probably if I don't even name the app because I know this function is change and that app let you search at that time they let you search the population for certain keywords so I was fascinated with this as a social science research tool so say well I can search in any location I can search Israel and look at everyone who lists themselves as vegan Wow no like I get a glimpse of what kind of person says they're vegan on a dating file in Israel and of course I could switch that to Los Angeles and switch that to London England or Germany and you could you you felt at least you were seeing certain trends ago okay over here this kind of person is vegan and over here this kind of persons began you know had this kind of fascinating glimpse into contrasting different cultures in different ways and okay let's say you set the search criteria to all of the United States of America please okay I want to see people who are both vegan and Muslim now I want to compare people who are vegan and Buddhist people who are vegan and say they speak Chinese like then you could kind of get this weird sense of a social science you know research experiment but as tantalizing as that is that's the worst possible example of exactly this sort of bias we're tight here because I'm only looking at people who interest me I'm only asking research questions that I'm already interested in and even then beyond that you might have the bias of you're only paying attention to profiles where the person is attractive or there's something about that that appeals to you right and I mean that's that's the sort of invisible barrier that I think tinder really breaks down I think for many of you even if you're not single if you're not dating if you're not looking around I think you'd have to go through several hundred profiles to have this experience right you have to start to account and you'd have to flip through at least everyone profiles but I think you like me would think wow these are the people in my neighborhood like this is this other side of society not just one there are many different sides your society that once in a while and heard about in the newspaper or on news on TV like I always knew there were these people who were against abortion and owned guns and went to do paintball people who would proudly put up an image of themselves decapitating a hog on their dating ville I am not kidding I have there were a lot of images of women slaughtering animals and dismembering animals they'd killed whether it was hunted or on a farm and you know fishing all this stuff these are the outdoor activities there they're proud of right okay like every so often I read about these people in the newspaper other stuff that comes up too and obviously the drug epidemic you have people using coded language and over at language saying yeah they do drugs and more drugs they do sing what they're into and in various ways you get to see different aspects of the culture that maybe you knew in theory existed ever but you get to see it in its most immediate its most inhuman pardon me its most human form in the very strange census that people participate in when they choose to take a picture of what they think of as their best life what it is they're proud of and share it with the world in the hopes of getting laid [Music]