Episode #49
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 . Send us Fan Mail 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. Join 20,000+ Leaders for Weekly Insights If you want deeper research and behind-the-scenes insights on generations and the future of culture and society, join Ryan’s weekly newsletter: https://ryanvet.com/collide
