Pulling the Rope Sideways: Empirical Test Results
Robin Hanson wrote this post a while back, which has since developed into a sort of inspiring slogan for how to achieve policy change: “Pull the Rope Sideways”
The policy world can thought of as consisting of a few Tug-O-War “ropes” set up in this high dimensional policy space. If you want to find a comfortable place in this world, where the people around you are reassured that you are “one of them,” you need to continually and clearly telegraph your loyalty by treating each policy issue as another opportunity to find more supporting arguments for your side of the key dimensions. That is, pick a rope and pull on it.
If, however, you actually want to improve policy, if you have a secure enough position to say what you like, and if you can find a relevant audience, then prefer to pull policy ropes sideways. Few will bother to resist such pulls, and since few will have considered such moves, you have a much better chance of identifying a move that improves policy. On the few main dimensions, not only will you find it very hard to move the rope much, but you should have little confidence that you actually have superior information about which way the rope should be pulled.
I recently wrote in a casual slack channel:
Hanson introduced the term “pull the rope sideways” and I think it’s a good concept. However the metaphor bugs me a bit. In a tug-o-war, is it actually the case that pulling sideways causes the rope to move much farther that if you pull the rope in one of the normie directions? Has anyone tested this? It’s not obvious to me why this would be true.
Vigorous debate ensued. We bought some rope and did a quick test.
Contrary to the expectations of most people in the thread, pulling the rope sideways didn’t seem to work—the overall effect seemed to be about the same as pulling it in one of the standard directions.
Afterwards we joked about the implications for EA macrostrategy. “I guess we should just… pick a side.” :D
I have actually tried this, not in tug-of-war, but with moving a stuck car (one end affixed to car, one end to a tree or lamppost or something). In that situation, where the objects aren’t actively adjusting to thwart you, it works quite well!
A Spanish windlass works (in part) on the same principle.
? Are you saying it’s easier to pull a stuck car out of a ditch if you pull sideways from the direction you want the car to go, than if you pull the car in the direction you want it to go? (If the other end of the rope is fixed to a tree). That’s interesting if true! I’m not sure whether it contradicts the tug o war result.
Yep! It might be easier to visualize with a train on tracks—the rope needs to be parallel to the intended direction of movement. Suppose the rope is nearly perfectly taut and tied to something directly in front of the train. Pulling the rope sideways w 100 newtons requires the perp component of force to be 100, definitionally. But the rope can only exert force along itself, so if it missed being taut by θ radians, it’ll be exerting enough force F that Fsinθ=100. But if the rope is very close to perfectly taut, then sinθ≈θ, so (in the limit), you’re exerting infinite force.
This fades pretty quickly as the rope gets away from the 0 angle, so you then need to secure the car so it won’t move back (rocks under tires or something), and re-tighten the rope, and iterate.
Nice. And I guess the reason it doesn’t work in tug o war is that there isn’t one side that is fixed; instead both sides are exerting roughly constant force and so it continues to cancel out?
That depends on how exactly the experiment was carried out. If both sides reoriented to pull at an angle, then you are not actually pulling sideways anymore, there’s just 3 sides now.
So a worked example:
Say a city has an inadequate budget. There is a movement pro more property tax, and a movement against increasing property tax.
Assume you are a senior partner in the city’s largest law firm with a lot of friends. (The kind of person who gets any voice at all in this kind of politics)
You could join the anti movement, and ask for outright tax rates of zero for some class. Such as senior citizens, families with young children, point is you are trying to change the movement from “generally low taxes” to “lower taxes a lot for a subgroup I am championing”. Simply asking for less taxes is just pulling with the group not sideways.
You could join the pro movement and ask for a variation on Georgism. Put all the increase into a tax on the land itself. Outraged empty lot (in downtown) owners come out to stop you. Simply asking for more taxes is pulling with the group not sideways.
Joining a group wanting to restrict AI progress and asking for a 30 year ban on any improvements or a ban on all technology and a reversion to the stone age is just pulling with the group. Adding a new dimension like a Blockchain record of GPU cluster utilization (making it more difficult for covert ASIs to exist undetected) would be adding a new dimension consistent with the groups goals.
Joining a pro AI group and asking for massive subsidies to chip manufacturers would be pulling with the groups goals. Asking the NIH to start a series of research grants on human tissue with cat fur genes edited in would be adding a new dimension consistent with the groups goals.
I wonder what kind of “tug” has the most effect. Do you ask for something reasonable that is within the Overton window of things a rational person might request, or just demand the earth and expect to get a small concession in reality.
Part of the problem here is you can’t be reasonable. You can’t join the anti property tax group and say the city actually is underfunded compared to other cities, even if thats reality. You can’t join the anti AI group and say GPT-4 is just so stupid adding 10 times the compute will still be deeply subhuman and cite your evidence. (Not claiming the latter just bioanchors says this is true, and generally “last 10 percent” problems can take logarithmically more effort, compute than the 90 percent case)
This was some kind of interesting update for me, but feels incomplete for the post to not at least mentioning the followup theory, which is “there may be forces that nudge the two most obvious sides to be equal, such that if you join one side another person is likely to join the opposing side to cancel you out, but, those forces don’t apply as much to the side”
(I realize this is a vague metaphor in the first place, but, as long as you’re overthinking a metaphor, do it thoroughly!)
I don’t understand, could you elaborate? What followup theory?
I thought there was explicit discussion of this in the relevant slack-channel but may be misremembering.
I’m not sure how to describe this differently than I just did, but to restate completely:
“Pull the rope sideways” is relevant to the domain of politics. A reason it actually is relevant to the domain of politics (regardless of how the tug-of-war metaphor plays out) is that people tend to form 2 opposing coalitions. Naively you might think you could show up to help one of the coalitions win, but when Team A see that Team B is “getting out the vote”, that also motivates Team A to work harder to get out the vote. You’re not a solitary actor, people respond to your actions.
And part of the point of the pull-sideways metaphor in politics is that there won’t be social patterns (or social explicitly-built-infrastructure) to notice and respond to when someone shows up to pull the rope sideways.
OK, thanks. I think it’s a plausible theory but I don’t think it’s the whole story or even the most plausible theory.
Here’s a thought experiment to illuminate what I expect you’re seeing:
You’re pulling a rope south against a group of people pulling the rope north. The group in front of you now starts pulling towards the rope north north west. What do you do? Do you A) begin to side step west so that you can continue to pull due south, attempting to rotate the rope from it’s current direction, or B) shift your weight so that you don’t get pulled sideways, and continue to pull against the rope which now means pulling somewhat easterly?
Now imagine you’re pulling a rope south against a group of people pulling the rope north. Only this time, the group behind you begins pulling the rope south south west. Do you A) shift your weight as as to retain your position on the ground and pull the rope against both groups of people, attempting to kink the rope, or do you B) side step to maintain your position along the line, and continue to pull along the rope which now means pulling somewhat westerly?
I’m guessing that people are going to choose B and B, which means that the middle is the worst position to pull from, since you cause everyone to automatically and unthinkingly oppose you. If you pull from the rear instead, and have people on the back of each team pulling to the same side, I bet you’ll get different results.
So, if we take this too seriously and apply it across the metaphor boundary, we conclude that the most effective way to achieve policy change is to pick a side, become the most radical member of that side, and then start pulling sideways? :D
I’d say “Don’t be that guy who injects themselves into the middle of a conversation about something else, and cause everyone to oppose you by trying to coopt the conversation to make it about your pet cause”.
And “Instead, introduce your influence into the things people are already fighting for and not looking at, so that they get the most progress on the issue they’re fighting by building on your input (rather than choosing to pick an additional battle with you).”
For example, I certainly wouldn’t position myself by saying “Regardless of where we draw the line on abortion (i.e. how much we murder babies/attempt to control women by regulating their bodies), what matters more is...”
On the other hand, I would argue for gun rights by emphasizing that the purpose of the second amendment is to protect minorities from oppression by giving them “veto power”, since it shifts the direction gun rights advocates would be pulling from, and the response is that gun rights advocates will pull along that line too instead of fighting it. Importantly, this isn’t just a “rhetorical trick”, but the actual better foundation in the first place, which is more widely recognizable as a solid justification and is in fact what many/most gun rights advocates are trying to pull towards in the first place even though they don’t know how to and can’t verbalize it well enough to pull accurately. “Shifting the direction of pull to one that is more true” is a good idea, as a rule of thumb.
It’s a little more complicated of a maneuver since it also positions the debate in a way that it connects with another line the opposition tends to try to pull in an opposing direction, and in which the directions people think they’re pulling and are actually pulling are very confused, but I think it demonstrates the “pull from behind” concept regardless.
I just assumed this works without even questioning it. ^^ Can you explain more concretely what you did? When I simulate this in my mind, I’m able to pull the rope sideways as long as there are less than three people pulling the rope at each side. They are also not allowed to counteract my pulling more than they would by default without my pulling, right?
We had two teams of 6 people (so 12 total) do a tug o war, and found that one team seemed slightly stronger than the other, but not strong enough to win immediately, it looked like there was at least 5-10 seconds of stasis.
Then we had a 13th person stand in the middle and pull the rope so as to help the weaker team. We didn’t go long enough to actually conclude the game, but it was looking like this made the difference between victory and defeat—the previously-weaker side now seemed stronger thanks to the additional person.
Then we did one last game, and this time the 13th person pulled sideways. They were able to cause the rope to bend a little bit, but only a little bit, and after a while they gave up. They weren’t able to make the rope/lines-of-people shift sideways to any noticeable degree, much less make them all lose their balance and fall over as several people suspected would happen.
I think the reason it doesn’t work is because a tug of war is not so much about the force vectors being added together, (if it was then pulling sideways would be effective). I think it is more about which side’s members are lighter or have worse shoes, and therefore slip. If you have 1 person pulling sideways (+y direction), and another 5 each pulling in the +x and -x directions respectively, then (ignoring the x direction), we have a force (it doesn’t matter who is exerting the force) pulling 1 person in the -y direction and 10 in the +y direction. Which group is going to slide first? (The 1 person I think). And when they do you just have the other 10 not having moved (the static friction was never overcome), and 1 person who has moved closer to the rope/everyone else, but has not moved them at all.
If tug of war was about the force vectors being added together, pulling sideways should be equally effective to pulling in any other direction, I think. (Imagine the rope is under so much tension from the preexisting pullers that you can model it as a steel bar. Further imagine that you are on a frictionless plane and everyone is exerting force via rocket thrusters. Your own little thruster will slowly accelerate the whole system equally fast in whichever direction you pick.)