Triple-Blind Bias

An even more extreme form of methodological worship, where blinding the data analysts as well is believed to purify the study of all human contamination. This bias fosters the dangerous myth that science can and should be a fully automated, personality-free process, denying the essential role of interpretation, theory, and judgment in discovery.

Example: A journal priding itself on only publishing "triple-blind" studies, creating a culture where surprising, anomalous, or interpretively complex findings are rejected because they don't fit the sterile, bias-free narrative. Triple-blind bias can stamp out scientific creativity in the name of robotic rigor.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Double-Blind Bias

The assumption that a double-blind protocol is a flawless truth machine, creating an infallible "fact." This bias ignores how the study's fundamental design, question framing, population selection, and statistical analysis are all loaded with human choices and cultural values before the first pill is blinded.

*Example: Citing a double-blind study "proving" a new antidepressant works, while ignoring that the study only measured a narrow, questionnaire-defined "depression" over 8 weeks in a hand-picked cohort, excluding people with complex comorbidities. The double-blind bias mistakes a specific, constructed result for universal, contextless truth.*

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Single-Blind Bias

Not just the flaw in a single-blind study, but the broader cultural bias that assumes a problem is solved once the subject's bias is controlled for. It ignores how the researcher's unchecked expectations, culture, and design choices still massively shape outcomes, creating an illusion of objectivity that is really just hidden subjectivity.

Example: A pharmaceutical company runs a study where patients don't know if they get the drug or placebo (single-blind), but the doctors hoping for a blockbuster drug do. Their unconscious encouragement of the treatment group skews results. The single-blind bias is the false confidence that blinding the subject alone guarantees neutrality.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

RCT Bias

The fetishization of the Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) as the "gold standard" to the point of dismissing all other forms of evidence, even in fields where RCTs are unethical, impossible, or meaningless. This bias assumes that if you can't randomize it and control it, you can't truly know it, making vast areas of social science and humanities seem illegitimate.

Example: A policymaker rejects a successful, community-developed poverty alleviation program because "there's no RCT proving it works better than a placebo intervention." The RCT bias prioritizes methodological purity over observable, real-world effectiveness, paralyzing action with impossible standards of proof.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Controlled Study Bias

The inherent distortion that occurs when the artificial, sanitized environment of a controlled laboratory setting becomes the only valid source of knowledge. This bias privileges data gathered in unnatural conditions over real-world observation, assuming that controlling variables reveals "pure" truth, even if it strips away the essential context that makes a phenomenon meaningful.

Example: Dismissing decades of ethnographic research on community resilience because "it wasn't a controlled study." The controlled study bias assumes that only knowledge produced in a lab-like setting—removed from the messiness of actual human life—counts as rigorous, rendering most real-world understanding "anecdotal."

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026