I wish I could see a video of what you mean. I think what I'm having difficulty understanding is because curly hair bends this way and that at different points along its length, how can you be sure what is sticking out isn't a full end that just happened to be close to a direction change in your hair's pattern?
I mean, if you look at a split magnified, it looks like this:
What you're looking at there is what you would see if you divided this line
_____ 100 times and then looked at one part of those hundred pieces.
So when you see a split, it has to have gone way beyond just that 1/100th of a centimeter damage you see there. If all the parts of the split are intact, it'd look like a fan or frayed or just fuzzy. But how y'all would be able to see that on a strand of hair and know for sure, I don't know.
BTW, sliding your finger down a strand may tell you if your cuticles are raised because the strand would feel rough. But even if it were possible to find a split that way, what is it you cut off? Does that mean you just remove half the damage? Coz a split happens to a whole strand, so if you're only cutting things that stick out, exactly what sort of strand are you leaving behind?
I took a photo of a shed hair at its life size and then magnified it 4 times. (Attached pics) I cannot even tell if that end on the magnified hair is a whole end or whether it has split coz human eyes are not made to see such tiny things and be able to distinguish such tiny changes. Definitely mine aren't coz they felt strained when I tried to examine that single strand. And if the magnified one was even hard for me to see, how could I possibly expect to be able to see a split on the real sized strand? And examine 100,000+ of them?