Nation State Bias

The unconscious predisposition to view the nation-state—a relatively modern construct of a bordered territory with a centralized government—as the natural, inevitable, and primary unit of human political organization. This bias leads to assuming global problems must have national solutions, that national identity is paramount, and that political maps divided into colored countries represent a fundamental reality, rather than a contingent, often violently imposed, administrative layer.

Example: When a pandemic hits, the immediate global response is framed by Nation State Bias: "What is France's policy? What is Brazil's strategy?" This overlooks more relevant units like cities, regions, or global supply chains, and creates competition for vaccines instead of coordinated, transnational public health planning.

by Nammugal February 5, 2026

Rationalization Bias

The innate cognitive drive to construct post-hoc, self-serving reasons for our actions, beliefs, or the status quo, in order to maintain a view of ourselves and our world as consistent, sensible, and just. It is the bias that powers the "just-world fallacy," making us invent reasons why victims deserve their fate or why our choices were optimal.

Example: After buying an excessively expensive car, you tell yourself, "It's an investment in safety and reliability, and it will hold its value," minimizing the role of status-seeking. This rationalization bias protects your self-image as a pragmatic person, not a show-off.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Logification Bias

The error of believing that making something sound logical—by structuring it with "therefore," "because," and "it follows that"—is the same as it being logical or true. It confuses the aesthetic of logic with its substance.

Example: A conspiracy theory that begins, "Based on publicly available data, we can deduce the following sequence..." and then lays out a chain of connected-sounding but evidence-free assertions. The logification bias leads people to accept it because it feels logical in its presentation, bypassing critical evaluation.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Hyperrationalization Bias

The tendency to generate overly complex, reason-heavy explanations for phenomena that are better explained by simpler, emotional, social, or irrational motives. It's the bias of the intellectualizer who cannot accept that people (or systems) often act from greed, fear, prejudice, or stupidity, and instead constructs elaborate rational edifices.

*Example: Explaining a populist political uprising not through economic despair and cultural anxiety, but through a 10-point model of "rational voter choice in response to declining signal-to-noise ratios in the media ecosystem." This hyperrationalization bias imposes a grid of rationality on fundamentally non-rational behavior.*

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Hyperlogification Bias

The predisposition to see all discourse and reality itself as primarily a system of logical propositions waiting to be formalized. This bias rejects narrative, metaphor, emotion, and ambiguity as noise, insisting that any meaningful statement can and must be translated into a logical formalism to be taken seriously.

Example: A professor tells a student that their poetic essay on loss is "meaningless" because it cannot be rendered as a series of truth-conditional statements. The hyperlogification bias demands that human experience be forced into the cage of symbolic logic, deeming what doesn't fit as illegitimate.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Hyperrationalism Bias

The fallacy that pure reason is the only valid tool to dissect any subject, including profound moral evils. It assumes one can and should debate the "logic" of racism, the "economic efficiency" of slavery, or the "rational merits" of genocide in a detached, clinical way, as if they were abstract puzzles. This bias mistakes the application of rationality for moral intelligence, and often serves to sanitize horror.

Example: A forum hosting a "rational debate" on the Holocaust where participants are instructed to "set aside emotions" and argue only from "statistical and strategic premises" about Nazi efficiency. The hyperrationalism bias creates a morally monstrous space where the form of rational discourse is used to eviscerate its ethical content.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

Clothing Label Bias

The cognitive distortion where, once a person is diagnosed with a mental illness, given a political label, or otherwise categorized, everything they subsequently do or say is interpreted through that label. Their rational arguments become "symptoms," their emotions become "proof of instability," and their identity is reduced to the diagnosis.

Example: A politician with a known anxiety disorder criticizes a policy. Opponents immediately frame it: "She's just having a panic attack about change. Her critique isn't logical, it's pathological." The clothing label bias uses the diagnosis as a pre-emptive discount on all future speech, confusing the person for the condition.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026