LessWrong (30+ Karma) “The Law of Positive-Sum Badness” by Davidmanheim
Mar 9, 2026
Discussion of why visible bad behavior on one side often predicts similar problems on the other. Exploration of mechanisms like selection bias, coalition contamination, contagion, imitation, and arms-race dynamics. Examination of media, incentives, provocation tactics, and situations where the pattern breaks down.
23:36
Coalitional Contamination Lets Extremists In
- Coalitions can attract opportunistic or harmful entrants because group labels provide cover and status.
- Entryism and protective ambiguity let extremists persist, and coalitions struggle to expel harmful members without appearing to disavow the cause.
Environmental Decay Degrades Both Sides
- When shared epistemic institutions and norms decay, both sides' discourse degrades regardless of ideological differences.
- Weak institutions, low trust, and media logics shift public argument toward performance over truth.
Contagion And Imitation Spread Bad Tactics
- Tactics like distortion and outrage spread from one coalition to another through imitation when they appear to work.
- Historical imitation theories and experiments show rivalry causes rivals to converge on the same harmful tactics.
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Intro
00:00 • 18sec
Statement of the Law
00:18 • 54sec
Bayesian and Game-Theoretic Framing
01:13 • 1min
Correlational Variants Overview
02:37 • 22sec
Selection and Visibility Bias
02:59 • 3min
Coalitional Contamination
05:37 • 2min
Environmental Decay
07:19 • 2min
Causal Variants Introduction
09:21 • 12sec
Contagion and Imitation
09:32 • 2min
Backlash and Reactive Deformation
11:48 • 2min
Symmetric Arms-Race Dynamics
13:48 • 2min
Adversarial and Mediated Causality
15:32 • 2min
Incentive Poisoning
17:24 • 1min
Provocation and Trap-Setting
18:47 • 2min
Limits and When It Doesn't Apply
20:17 • 3min
Misuse Risk: Motivated Invocation
22:55 • 32sec
Outro
23:26 • 8sec
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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.