Same Footage, Two Verdicts

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 (Ahn et al., 2014).

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 ultrasound did its job perfectly.

What the ultrasound could not say was what any of it meant. It could report a mass. It could not report that 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 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 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 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 someone hacking a personal security camera in a bedroom, but it has happened. At it has happened a lot more than we talk about.

Minyvonne Burke, a Senior Breaking News Reporter, put together an article years ago, outlining a hack in which someone told an 8-year-old girl from Mississippi he was Santa 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 Chicagoland family reported that a stranger was talking to their 7-month-old through their camera while simultaneously cranking up the heat to 90 degrees in his room (Burke, NBC, 2019).

But those are the 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 implications of monitoring children may be, but what are the deeper, long-term ramifications of constant tracking and watching through a screen?

The harm underneath 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 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 removed the friction of having to ask, having to wonder, having to take someone at their word. What came back at 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 the thing we have all quietly agreed to believe: that the proof cannot lie.

I need to be careful with the 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 in 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 its 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 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 this short video. Watch it and follow the instructions. Most of you will miss the most 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 go back to South Korea. A country was told to look for cancer, so it found cancer. And the outcome was overdiagnosis. The ultrasounds actually detected what they referred to as micro-cancer, a cancer that would have likely had little to no impact on the patients’ 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 people were found to have these tiny thyroid cancers they never knew about, the highest rate ever recorded (Harach et al., 1985). They lived their whole lives and died of something else entirely, unaware the 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 overtreatment 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 that 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 a 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 students from both schools the same film and asked them to count the infractions. Princeton students saw Dartmouth commit about twice as many as Dartmouth students saw. Same film. Same plays. Two entirely different games (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954).

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 used 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 one finding it did not. Then they did something clever. They swapped the methods, so that the same 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 rigorous one and whichever study disagreed as the flawed one. They were not judging the research. They were judging the verdict, and then reverse-engineering their way to it. Both groups walked away more convinced they had been right all along (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979). Sound like polarity in politics today?

The evidence did not pull them together. It armed them and divided them.

Even the proof can be skewed itself simply based on angle. In 2019, researchers showed 2,119 people footage of the same use of force by a police officer. Some watched footage from a body camera, 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 it just happened (Turner et al., 2019). Same event. Same officer. The only thing that moved was the camera. Move it three feet, and the verdict moves with it. Obviously, the study goes much deeper with 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 and focus on what we have even witnessed. You already know this, because you have watched it happen for a decade. Body cam footage or bystander footage of an incident goes online, and within hours the country has sorted itself into two rooms watching the same file. Sometimes one side has more of the proof than the other, clearly. Most of the time both sides believe they are the side with the proof, and both sides are being honest about it.

If that is too heavy, 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 that I pulled the photo into Photoshop and used the color dropper to prove it. And I was right. Did that make everybody else wrong? Their perception was real to them.

It is more proof, but does more proof build trust between people? It causes 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 I am a fan of metrics and data, and even love the false sense of security my security cameras give me.

So go back to the tower. If I had pulled up that footage and it was inconclusive, and 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 with 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 read it differently. We see this in politics now more than ever. We see this when social media erupts. The idea that I am right, and you are not just mistaken; you are dishonest and have malicious intent.

We are raising Gen Alpha and Gen Beta in a world where every step is monitored, every moment is photographed, 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 the footage is real, 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.