Confirmation Bias of Everything

A philosophical dead-end stemming from a misreading of Kant, which asserts that all human perception and cognition is nothing but confirmation bias. Since we can never know the "thing-in-itself" (noumenon) and only interpret phenomena through our mental categories, this view claims every observation is simply confirming the pre-existing structures of our mind. It’s a radical skepticism that makes genuine learning or surprise impossible, reducing all experience to a tautological loop.

Example: After a surprising scientific discovery that overturns a theory, someone dismisses it by saying, "The new data only 'confirms' the scientists' hidden bias toward novelty. They were biased to find a change, just as the old guard was biased to find stability. It's all just confirmation bias of everything." This nihilistic take uses epistemology to void empirical evidence entirely.

by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026

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

Confirmation Bias of Everything

The radical epistemological position that all human cognition, without exception, is fundamentally shaped by confirmation bias. It argues that what we call "objective reasoning" is merely a socially-sanctioned, institutionalized form of confirmation bias—one that happens to align with dominant paradigms. From a child learning that fire burns (confirming the hypothesis with each painful touch) to a physicist interpreting particle collisions (seeking confirmation of the Standard Model), the brain is not a neutral truth-finder but a hypothesis-confirming machine. The theory posits that there is no "view from nowhere"; every observation, every logic chain, every mathematical proof is performed by a mind that unconsciously favors its starting assumptions. Thus, confirmation bias isn't a bug in human cognition—it is human cognition.

Example: A devout Christian reads scripture and finds endless confirmations of God's plan. An atheist reads the same text and finds endless confirmations of Bronze Age mythology. Both claim to be objective. Confirmation Bias of Everything suggests neither is lying or stupid; both are performing the universal human algorithm: starting from a premise and finding evidence that fits. The believer and skeptic are not different species of thinker; they are identical engines running different source code, each exhaustively validating its own axioms.

by Dumu The Void February 11, 2026