Bias of Everything

The paralyzing, often disingenuous, insistence that because all perspectives are inherently biased (by culture, experience, etc.), no perspective can claim superior footing for understanding reality. This "meta-bias" is used to create false equivalence, arguing that since a historian and a conspiracy theorist both have biases, their claims deserve equal weight. It mistakes the universal condition of situatedness for the negation of rigor, evidence, or truth-seeking.

Example: In a climate debate, someone dismisses the IPCC's decades of peer-reviewed research by saying, "Your scientists are biased by grant money. My oil-funded blogger is biased too. It's all just bias. Nobody can know." The bias of everything argument is a thought-terminating cliché that elevates skeptical parity over the vast differentials in evidence, methodology, and reliability.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

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

Biases about Biases

The preconceived, often simplistic, notions we hold about what bias is and who has it. These are stereotypes about bias itself—e.g., "liberal media bias," "conservative denialism," "academic elitism"—that people use as pre-packaged filters to dismiss information without engaging. It's bias at a meta-level: being wrong about how wrongness operates.

Biases about Biases Example: A viewer immediately dismisses a documentary on climate change because "It's from Netflix, and Netflix has a woke bias." This is not an analysis of the film's evidence, but the application of a bias about bias—a canned ideological shortcut that prevents any actual evaluation of content.

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