Same Footage, Two Verdicts - Surveillance, Confirmation Bias, and Why More Proof Erodes Trust

We built machines to settle our arguments. Instead we built extraordinarily precise machines for generating material for the argument we were already having.

In the late 1990s, thyroid ultrasounds got cheap, so South Korea started running them in routine screenings. Diagnoses climbed roughly fifteenfold between 1993 and 2011. Thyroid cancer became the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the country. Surgeons removed thyroids by the thousands. And the death rate never moved (Ahn, Kim & Welch, New England Journal of Medicine, 2014).

The machines were not wrong. The scans were accurate. What the ultrasound could not say was what any of it meant. A country was told to look for cancer, so it found cancer.

In this episode of The Ryan Vet Show, USA TODAY bestselling author, generational futurist, and international keynote speaker Ryan Vet argues that proof is not a verdict. Proof is a mass on a scan, a video from a doorbell, a number on a dashboard, a location on a map. It sits there. Someone still has to decide what it means. This is the third installment in the childhood surveillance series, and it is the one where the promise of the camera falls apart: we removed the friction of having to ask, having to wonder, having to take someone at their word, and what came back was not more truth. It was more proof. And proof does not settle anything.

The research is unusually blunt about this. In 1951 Princeton and Dartmouth played a famously ugly football game; researchers showed students from both schools the same film and asked them to count infractions. Princeton students saw Dartmouth commit about twice as many as Dartmouth students did. Same film, two different games, nobody lying (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954). Hand people on both sides of the death penalty the same two studies and swap the methods between them, and they will rate whichever one agrees with them as the rigorous one, then walk away more convinced than when they started (Lord, Ross & Lepper, 1979). Show 2,119 people the same use of force and simply move the camera three feet, from a dash cam to a body cam, and the verdict moves with it (Turner et al., PNAS, 2019).

Then there is the harm nobody markets. Ring cameras in children's bedrooms have been hacked, and it has happened more than we talk about (Burke, NBC News, 2019).

In this episode:

• South Korea's thyroid cancer surge, and what overdiagnosis actually costs
• Why 35.6% of people in a Finnish autopsy study had cancers they never knew about, and died of something else
• The known harm is rarely the real harm: what social media taught us and we ignored
• You find what you are told to look for
• Princeton, Dartmouth, and one football film that produced two different games
• Why handing both sides the same evidence pushes them further apart
• Body camera versus dash camera, and a verdict that moves three feet
• The dress, and why your perception felt like proof
• What Ryan's son was really asking when he said "just check the camera"
• Polarity is not disagreeing about the proof. It is agreeing the proof is the only thing worth believing, then reading it differently.

The series so far: Part one, Did You Get the Photo of the Goat? Part two, Just Check the Camera, Dad. Next week: what happens when the proof itself was never real.

Go deeper: This episode is drawn from Ryan's COLLIDE essay of the same name, with every study cited. Read it free at ryanvet.com/collide.

About Ryan Vet

Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold.

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Transcript

Ryan Vet 0:00

On this episode of the Ryan Vett Show, polarity is what happens when we agree that the proof is the only thing worth believing, and then we read it differently. We see this in politics now more than ever. We see this when social media erupts. It transforms it into the idea that I am right and you're not just mistaken, you are dishonest and you have malicious intent. We are raising Gen Alpha and Gen Beta in a world where every step is monitored, every moment is photographed, and every corner is watched. It is full of proof, but the proof is interpreted differently. We are putting our faith and trust in evidence captured by a machine, in metrics and numbers and sleep scores and location data, not in asking questions and having a normal human conversation. And now, a reading from Ryan Vett's newsletter, Collide. Same footage, two verdicts. Why more proof is making us trust each other less. In the late 1990s, thyroid ultrasounds were cheap. So in South Korea, these ultrasounds became a part of nearly every routine health screening. It was a few extra dollars. Nobody was suspicious of anything. It was just there, so why not? What was found was staggering. Thyroid cancer diagnoses in South Korea climbed roughly 15 times between 1993 and 2011. It became the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the country. Surgeons removed thyroids by the thousands, and yet the death rate from thyroid cancer never moved. So it begs the question, were they catching and treating cancer early enough that the death rate held steady or was something else going on? The machines were not wrong, the scans were accurate. The ultrasounds did the job perfectly. What the ultrasound could not say was what any of it meant. It could report a mass, it could not report if you were going to live to age 88 and die of something else entirely, or if the threat of thyroid cancer was terminal. A country was told to look for cancer, so it found cancer. The known harm is rarely the real harm. We have made this mistake before and recently. The known value of social media was connectivity. The known harm was oversharing. Now we have millennial parents in particular, sharenting. Sharenting simply means sharing every aspect of parenting online, the good, the bad, the ugly, and for many onlookers, oversharing of their kids' daily lives and routines. It creates a digital footprint permanence that Gen Alpha and Gen Beta will grow up with. The known harm argued on social media would make people's private lives too public. Individuals put things online you should not have put online. People no longer had a private life. Everyone saw that harm coming and it captured early discourse on the dangers of social media. However, underneath constant posting or spending too much time online, something quieter was at work. Social media actually eroded community, the very thing it was said to create. It manufactured comparison, spurned jealousy, it handed us a false version of reality and taught a generation to curate their image and appearance. They learned how to spin a narrative. But what was not addressed was the algorithm that kept feeding it all to us. Childhood surveillance has its known harms too, and they are real. Privacy is real. Helicopter parents have become controlling parents. They've created a watched generation. Every camera you put in your home is a device that can be breached, and those attacks are not theoretical. These smart device companies have done a phenomenal job at reputation management, and it's hard to find stories of cybersecurity attacks or of someone hacking a personal security camera in a bedroom, but it has happened, and it has happened a lot more than we talk about. Minnie Von Burke, a senior breaking news reporter, put together an article years ago outlining a hack in which someone told an eight-year-old girl from Mississippi he was Santa Claus through the ring camera in her room. Or in Florida, racial slurs being spewed at a 15-year-old through their family's camera. A Chicago land family reported that a stranger was talking to their seven month old through their camera while simultaneously cranking up the heat to 90 degrees in his room. But those are known harms. They are situational, they are nameable. But my deeper concern goes beyond all of that. We can point to what we think the implication of monitoring children may be, but what are the deeper, long-term ramifications of constant tracking and watching through a screen? The harm underneath it is not about what the camera takes from your child. It is about where you and I have quietly decided to put our belief and focus and our trust. For every bit of friction we remove, there is an equal and opposite reaction. As we've explored in the first two parts of this series, from the photo of the goat to the camera my son told me to check, we remove the friction of having to ask, having to wonder, having to take someone at their word. What came back to us was not more truth, it was proof. And proof, it turns out, does not settle anything at all. Proof does not render verdicts. Last week I left you with a thing we have all quietly believed, that the proof cannot lie. I need to be careful with that word because proof sounds like a conclusion, and it is not one. Proof is a mass on a scan. It is a video from a doorbell, it is a number on a dashboard, a location on a map, a sleep score, and an app. It sits there. It has never once rendered a verdict, or at least not an intelligent verdict forged in human wisdom and experience. Someone has to look at it, decide what it means, and decide what to do about what they decided. A while back, writing about Gen Z and surveillance, I mentioned that Walmart had started testing body cameras on his own employees, and I said that was a topic for another essay. This is that essay. You find what you are told to look for. There is a step that happens just before the proof is ever reviewed, and it undoubtedly prejudices how that proof is ultimately interpreted and applied. During one of my keynotes on leadership and communication across the generations, I do an experiment with the audience. The punchline is that what you perceive and the reality may not exactly align. You can experience it in the short video I'm including in the show notes here on my YouTube channel. Watch it and follow the instructions. Most of you will miss the obvious proof in the video, and you will miss it because you were doing exactly what you were asked to do, not because you're unobservant. Now let's go back to South Korea. A country was told to look for cancer, so it found cancer, and the outcome was over-diagnosis. The ultrasounds actually detected what they referred to as microcancer, a cancer that would have likely had little to no impact on the patient's life expectancy. But because of the precision and overdiagnosis, many patients had surgeries that led to vocal cord paralysis, needing to take hormone supplements, and many other negative side effects. In fact, in one Finnish autopsy study, 35.6% of the people were found to have these tiny thyroid cancers that never knew about it, the highest rate ever recorded. They lived their whole life and died of something entirely different, unaware that cancer was ever there. The ultrasound was not lying, it was told what to look for, so it found it. And all too often that positive response became overdiagnosis and over-treatment with deep, unintended consequences. Just check the camera. Which brings me back to my son and the tower illustration from last week. When he told me to check the camera, he was not asking me to find the truth. He was asking me to skip a step. He wanted to skip the human-to-human dialogue that forced conversation, disagreement, and ultimately resolution. He wanted to remove the friction in finding the truth. He wanted a machine to render the verdict so his brother would not have to be believed. If, by chance, I were to do the instant replay to see what happened to the tower between the brothers, I would naturally interpret the video through my own lens. I may reach a verdict based on what I saw. That is what worries me. Not that the camera would be wrong, that both my boys would take the device's answer over each other's word. Same footage, two different games. This phenomenon is nothing new. In fact, in 1951, Princeton and Dartmouth played a famously ugly football game. Afterward, two researchers showed the students from both schools the same film and asked them to count the infractions. Princeton students saw the Dartmouth team commit about twice as many infractions as Dartmouth students saw. Same film, same plays, two entirely different games perceived. Nobody was lying. The participants of the study genuinely believed that they saw different things, though the proof was the same. Another classic study that is textbook in many psychology courses uses capital punishment as a barometer. Researchers took people who strongly supported the death penalty and people who strongly opposed it and handed both groups the same two studies. One finding it deterred murder and another finding it did not. Then they did something clever. They swapped the methods so that the research design landed on the pro side for half the readers and the anti side for the other half. It did not matter. Everyone rated whichever study agreed with them as the more rigorous study, and whichever study disagreed with them as the study that was flawed. They were not even judging the research. They were judging the verdict and then reverse engineering their way to it. Both groups walked away more convinced that they had been right all along. Doesn't it sound like polarity in politics today? The evidence did not pull them together, it armed them and it divided them. Even the proof can be skewed itself simply based on the angle. In twenty nineteen, researchers showed two thousand one hundred and nineteen people footage of the same use of force by a police officer. Some watch footage from a body cam, some from a dash camera. The ones who watched the dash camera footage were more likely to say the officer intentionally used force. The ones who watched the body camera, where the officer is strapped to the camera and you can barely see him, were more likely to say the events just happened. Same event, same officer, the only thing that changed was the camera. Move it at three feet and the verdict moves with it. Obviously that study goes much deeper with the implications beyond the scope of my argument. But the point remains the same. When we rely on surveillance, the answer still isn't always clear. Set the studies aside for a second and focus on what we even witness. You already know this because you've watched it happen for a decade. Body camera footage or bystander footage of an incident goes viral online, and within hours the country has sorted itself into two rooms watching that same file. Sometimes one side has more proof than the other, clearly. However, most of the time, both sides believe that they are the side with the proof, and both sides are being honest about it. If that is too heavy of an example, remember the dress. Years ago, the entire internet went to war over a photograph of a dress. Some people saw white and gold, some saw blue and black. I knew what I saw, and I was so sure I pulled that photo into Photoshop and used the color dropper tool to prove it. And thankfully I was right. So, did that make everyone else who disagreed with me wrong? Well, their perception was real to them. I provided more proof, but the question is, does proof actually build trust between people? It can actually cause distrust because you can look at the same thing and not see what the other person is seeing. What we do with it. We wanted a referee that could not be questioned. We wanted the friction taken out of finding the truth. So we implemented surveillance. We built an extraordinarily precise machine for generating material for the argument we were already having. And hear me when I say that I'm a fan of metrics and data and even love the false sense of security my security cameras give me at my house. So let's go back to my boys in the tower. If I had pulled up that footage and it was inconclusive as it usually is, does anyone win? Or do I now have two boys with a muddier argument and one less reason to look at each other, to talk to each other, and to ultimately find a solution? Polarity is not what happens when we disagree about the proof. Polarity is what happens when we agree that the proof is the only thing worth believing, and then we read it differently. We see this in politics now more than ever. We see this when social media erupts. It transforms it into the idea that I am right and you're not just mistaken, you are dishonest and you have malicious intent. We are raising Gen Alpha and Gen Beta in a world where every step is monitored, every moment is photographed, and every corner is watched. It is full of proof, but the proof is interpreted differently. We are putting our faith and trust in evidence captured by a machine, in metrics and numbers and sleep scores and location data, not in asking questions and having a normal human conversation. In a world where we are producing more proof, we are eroding more trust. The question is what you do with the person standing on the other side of it. Once the video has finished playing and you still have to live with them or work with them. And every word of this assumes that the footage is real and that it's not generated, fabricated, or altered. Next week, we will explore a world in which the proof we rely on wasn't even real to begin with. This is part three of a five-part series. I encourage you to go to Ryanvet.com slash show to listen to it, or go to Ryanvet.com slash collide to read each of the essays. Thank you for listening to this reading of Collide. Until next time, I'm Ryan. Thanks for tuning in to the Ryan Vet Show. Be sure to subscribe, comment, and like this episode. Plus, share it with someone who needs to hear it.