Bias of Fact-Checking

The inherent skew introduced when the process of verifying factual claims becomes institutionalized, gatekept by specific media or tech entities, and is applied disproportionately. This bias isn't about truth vs. falsehood, but about which truths get scrutinized, how context is framed, and whose statements are subjected to a forensic audit while others enjoy implied credibility. It often reflects the political and cultural priorities of the fact-checking institution.

Example: A fact-checking organization rigorously rates a progressive politician's minor statistical exaggeration as "Mostly False," while using a more charitable, context-laden analysis to rate a conservative ally's demonstrably false claim about election integrity as "Lacking Context." The bias of fact-checking lies in the uneven application of scrutiny, shaping public perception of credibility rather than merely dispensing truth.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Logical Bias

The fallacy of believing that a conclusion derived from a formally valid logical structure is necessarily true or meaningful in the real world. This bias venerates the syntactic correctness of an argument while being blind to the factual inaccuracy of its premises or its deliberate abstraction from reality. Perfect logic, perfectly wrong.

Example: "Premise 1: All birds can fly. Premise 2: A penguin is a bird. Conclusion: Therefore, penguins can fly." The logical bias is the insistence that the airtight logic of the syllogism somehow challenges biological reality, or that pointing out the false premise is "cheating" at the logical game. Form is prized over substance.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Rational Bias

The cognitive distortion where one's own reasoning is perceived as perfectly objective, simply because it follows internal logical rules, while ignoring that the starting premises, value judgments, and framing of the problem are themselves subjective, emotional, or culturally loaded. It's the bias of believing you're bias-free because you feel coldly logical.

Example: A CEO making a "rational" decision to offshore jobs after a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis. Their rational bias allows them to ignore the premises they accepted without question: that shareholder value is the supreme metric, and that community destruction is an external "cost" not factored in.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Experiment Bias

The overarching bias that privileges the experimental method itself as the sole arbiter of truth. It assumes that if you cannot isolate, manipulate, and measure a phenomenon in an experiment, it is not a legitimate object of knowledge. This renders history, ethics, love, and justice mere matters of opinion.

Example: Dismissing the concept of systemic racism because "you can't run a controlled experiment on society." Experiment bias confuses one powerful tool for knowledge with the definition of knowledge itself, rendering most of human experience allegedly unknowable.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Triple Blind Spot Bias

A profound, systemic ignorance where a field is blind to its cultural assumptions, its political embeddedness, and the limitations of its core methodology. This creates an impenetrable, self-referential system that mistakes its own internally consistent outputs for objective reality, aggressively dismissing outsider critique from all angles.

Example: Certain strands of behaviorist psychology in its heyday: blind to cognitive processes (methodological bias), blind to its role in social control (political bias), and blind to its culturally-specific definition of "behavior" (cultural bias). This triple blind spot bias made it a closed, totalizing system.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Double Blind Spot Bias

When two major, reinforcing areas of ignorance coexist, creating a powerful, self-validating distortion. For example, a field might be blind to both its cultural bias and its commercial funding influences. Each blind spot protects the other; questioning one is dismissed by appealing to the rigor implied by the other.

Example: Nutrition science historically blind to both cultural dietary diversity and the massive funding influence of the food industry. This double blind spot bias produced "universal" dietary guidelines that reflected Western habits and industry interests, while dismissing other diets as unscientific.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Single Blind Spot Bias

A metaphor for a researcher's (or field's) one major, unconscious area of ignorance that systematically skews how they design experiments and interpret data. It's the one big thing they cannot see about their own assumptions—often their cultural, gendered, or economic viewpoint—which acts as a hidden lens distorting everything.

*Example: A 20th-century psychology field dominated by wealthy Western men designing studies on "human" motivation using only male undergraduates as subjects. Their single blind spot bias—assuming their experience was universal—led them to pathologize women and non-Westerners for differing.*

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026