On Confirmation Bias

I want to settle this issue once and for all: no, not everyone has or will retain some bias, even only a slight one.  It irritates me when people say otherwise.  Why?  Because not only is such a claim inherently irrational (and simply false), it provides a perfect way for people who do rely on confirmation bias to project their own failures and errors onto other people.  I have seen this confirmation bias--a tendency to assume a position and then not rightly confront or yield to contrary proofs or evidences, explaining them away in a manner not consistent with reality--get cited as a universal problem, sometimes invoked as a hopeless weakness of all humans.

But is this true?

It is utterly illogical to say that everyone struggles with confirmation bias or that everyone succumbs to it just by nature of being a sentient thinking being.  Think everyone has it just because you think everyone you've encountered displays it?  That argument commits the fallacy of composition and suffers from begging the question and non sequiturs.  Just because some are biased doesn't mean all are; if you suffer from confirmation bias, it does not follow that anyone else you meet is; nothing logically necessitates that one must have bias simply by being a thinking being, and anyone who disagrees begs the question overtly.

I find it very suspiciously ironic that the people I see complain the most about the alleged "universality" or "invisibility" of confirmation bias often use confirmation bias themselves.  One could easily feign or misdirect a sense of humility by pretending like all humans have immovable biases entrenched in their thinking, and one could also, as I alluded to above, easily project their errors onto others.  Any people who say or implies that because they're human they inevitably are attracted to some bias or set of biases are not only illogical, but they are possibly engaging in an intellectually dangerous game of deflecting away legitimate refutations of their beliefs, because, according to them, "We all have our biases".  This can also be used as a way to argue for total epistemological skepticism, a self-refuting impossible conclusion.

The extent to which one aligns himself or herself with reason itself is the extent to which someone's reasoning and arguments are infallible.  The solution, then, to confirmation bias is simple: learn and live by logic.  Is this truly so difficult?  At least for me as an individual, no.  I want the entirety of my life to stand as a testament, a monument of sorts, to reason and its illumination.  In the process of pursuing reason over the past few years, I have discovered just how simple it is to grasp logic.  Do not fear some imaginary bias; identify true fallacies and expose them.

Logic, people.  It is helpful--and it is true whether or not you admit it, care about it, or believe it is.