I keep running into similar arguments online, where people attack “the other” and use the (correct) observation of badness to claim their side is therefore doing well. There's a temptation to correct this by saying that in a dispute between two sides, one side being bad isn’t causally making the other better, or asserting that badness of the two are not correlated.

This is tempting, but wrong - because they are correlated, in the opposite direction, and that leads to my observation:

Manheim's Law of Positive-Sum Badness: In polarized disputes, evidence that one side is stupid, malicious, or evil increases the probability that the opposing side is too.

As the name points out, the badness isn’t zero-sum: both camps can be stupid, reasoning poorly, being annoying, and/or factually mistaken, and they often are several. The law isn’t saying the two sides are equivalent, and the observed side should get most of the update, but the mechanisms generating dysfunction in one camp tend to reach the other as well.

The underlying claim is Bayesian. Observing evidence E about side A shifts the posterior over both sides’ quality, with a much larger shift for A than for B. But the claim [...]

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Outline:

(02:55) Correlational Variants

(03:28) Selection and Visibility Bias

(05:28) Coalitional Contamination

(07:05) Environmental Decay

(09:19) Causal Variants

(09:31) Trifecta of Escalatory Failures

(09:45) Contagion and Imitation

(11:46) Backlash and Reactive Deformation

(13:47) Symmetric Arms-Race Dynamics

(15:31) Adversarial and Mediated Causality

(17:23) Incentive Poisoning (or: Adversarial Environmental Decay)

(18:43) Provocation and Trap-Setting

(20:16) When the Law Doesnt Apply

(22:53) Motivated invocation

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First published:
March 8th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HZCEoFRKdzFAKcgFj/the-law-of-positive-sum-badness

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“The Law of Positive-Sum Badness” by Davidmanheim

LessWrong (30+ Karma)