Yoav Ravid

Karma: 3,606

I’m writing a book about Liberalism. I call it Mechanisms of Liberty: The Shortcomings of Modern Liberalism and How to Fix It.

My main interest is in economic and governance mechanisms, my secondary interest is education, and I’m also interested in other core LW subjects, like rationality, epistemology, ethics, evolution, and cryptography.

I’m 24yo. I live in Israel. My hobbies include singing, playing guitar and drums, Krav Maga, Dancing (WCS), indoor boulder climbing, Juggling and hiking.

The best essay I wrote is Building Blocks of Politics: An Overview of Selectorate Theory (but my book will be better 😉).

I’m also on Twitter :)

Yoav Ravid Dec 19, 2024, 6:16 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
I don’t think that’s enough? I have 3.5k Karma, which gives me a strong vote power of 7, but when I made this post the other post was on 5 Karma and long gone from the front page. It only started gaining karma and came back to the frontpage after I made this post.
And I kinda dislike “why am I getting downvoted” posts, so I would like mechanisms that make them unnecessary.

Yoav Ravid Dec 19, 2024, 6:07 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Maxwell Peterson’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve been writing it for a year already without talking about it much publicly, and wanted to put it out there so people know what I’m doing. I see it similarly to the updates people give here on their research agendas or work they intend to do. I agree that for LW (but not for twitter, for which this was originally written) it’s probably good to put more meat and give more detail about what the book will discuss. Maybe I’ll edit it in.
Edit: I added a list at the end of the post of things I plan to discuss or look into

Yoav Ravid Dec 19, 2024, 6:00 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
I think there’s an asymmetry problem here. An early downvote hides the post from the frontpage and impedes it from getting more evaluations, so it’s a pit that’s hard to get out from (without, say, creating a different post asking why your first post is in the pit :P). An early upvote, on the other hand, exposes the post to more evaluations by keeping it longer on the frontpage, and it’s easy for later downvotes to push it back down, so it’s more like a slippery hill than a pit.
So I think a mechanism that would avoid premature burials of posts would overcome some of the noise and lead to more information being incorporated into the “final” evaluation of the post (the karma it stabilizes on).

Yoav Ravid Dec 19, 2024, 5:49 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: plex’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
I think making downvotes completely unavailable beneath a certain karma level wouldn’t be good.
But also I think the outsized effects of downvotes is strongest when it’s one of the first votes, (as it was) rather than when it’s one among many votes, because it also makes the post disappear from the front page and takes away from it the chance to get more votes. upvotes don’t do that, because they make the post stay longer on the frontpage, so it can always later gain more downvotes by new people getting exposed to it.
So if we do limit the power of downvotes or who can cast them, perhaps it should be focused on early votes, and not votes in general?

Yoav Ravid Dec 19, 2024, 1:49 PM
2 points
0
on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
Ok, I really don’t get why my post announcing my book got downvoted (ignored is one thing, downvoted quite another)...
Update: when I made this post the original post was on 5 Karma and out of the frontpage. Now it’s 15 Karma, which is about what I expected it to get, given that it’s not a core topic of LW and doesn’t have a lot of information (though I now added some more information at the end), so I’m happy. Just a bit of a bummer that I had to make this post to get the original post out of the pit of obscurity it was pushed into by noise.

I’m Writing a Book About Liberalism

Yoav RavidDec 19, 2024, 12:13 AM

6 points

6 comments2 min readLW link

Yoav Ravid Dec 15, 2024, 11:19 PM
3 points
0
on: Focus on the places where you feel shocked everyone’s dropping the ball
I think I was already doing what this post suggested before it was published, but the distilled phrase was good and I thought about it quite often since.
Where it meets me personally—I’m shocked at how Liberals are dropping the ball on Liberalism. It is incredibly important, and yet Liberals don’t properly understand it and don’t know how to defend it, at a time where it’s under an onslaught by anti-liberals. To be slightly glib, I basically believe that everyone is wrong about Liberalism. I don’t know of anyone who shares my understanding of it. So I’m trying to finally pick up the ball by writing a book about how to fix Liberalism (and actually, a year ago today is exactly when I began writing it).

Yoav Ravid Dec 5, 2024, 7:23 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Terence Coelho’s comment on: Open Thread Fall 2024
Sounds like a question a non-human would ask :P

Yoav Ravid Dec 4, 2024, 5:12 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Open Thread Fall 2024
Maybe it can be good to have a “add post to sequence” option when you click the context menu on a post. That’s more intuitive than going to the library page.

Yoav Ravid Nov 30, 2024, 4:44 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: mukashi’s comment on: What are the good rationality films?
Just watched it upon your recommendation. Thanks! It is indeed a fantastic film, and a great example of (epistemic) rationality.

Yoav Ravid Oct 25, 2024, 12:03 PM
2 points
0
on: Egregores
Would Moloch qualify as an Egregores?

Yoav Ravid Oct 23, 2024, 5:31 AM
4 points
0
on: Could randomly choosing people to serve as representatives lead to better government?
I recently read Terry Bouricious’ book about Sortition and I highly recommend it (It’s completely free on his substack)

Yoav Ravid Oct 21, 2024, 3:58 AM
4 points
2
on: Overcoming Bias Anthology
Typo: It’s Prediction Markets “Fail” To *Mooch (not Moloch)

Yoav Ravid Oct 2, 2024, 11:06 AM
5 points
0
on: Should we abstain from voting? (In nondeterministic elections)
Reducing the amount of voters can be good because it increases the remaining voters’ motive to become well informed instead of remaining rationally ignorant, but it won’t work if people just self refrain, because the people who refrain will probably me exactly those that should remain.
Using sortition to pick a representative subset of the population to vote solves this problem.

Yoav Ravid Sep 26, 2024, 1:36 PM
4 points
−2
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: [Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
Technically it makes sense for the nuked side to lose everything and for the nuking side to gain little. But you want to model a scenario where the sides might actually want to nuke the other side, which you have naturally between enemies, but don’t have between LessWrongers unless you incentivize them somehow. So giving rewards for nuking makes sense, because people want to increase their own Karma but don’t want to decrease the Karma of others.
And I think the incentives are deliberately designed such that no nukes aren’t the obvious optimal equilibrium. That’s what makes it an exercise in not destroying the world. If it were easy it wouldn’t be much of an exercise.

Yoav Ravid Sep 26, 2024, 1:32 PM
9 points
3
on: [Completed] The 2024 Petrov Day Scenario
This is extremely cool! good job! Looking forward to seeing how this unfolds, which will unfortunately happen mostly as I sleep (and as a citizen I hope to come out at the end of this with no change to my Karma)

Yoav Ravid Sep 25, 2024, 7:02 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
Thanks. If it’s indeed framed as a game then I would like to participate as well. So I pressed the button and opted in.

Yoav Ravid Sep 25, 2024, 6:19 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: Milan W’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
That sounds like a terrible strategy. Your threat won’t be credible because your goal is to make the world better, not destroy it. And anything you do to make the threat credible (like some sort of precomitment mechanism) will risk the world actually getting destroyed.

Yoav Ravid Sep 25, 2024, 5:23 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: nick lacombe’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
Did anything happen after you pressed it?

Yoav Ravid Sep 25, 2024, 2:50 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
How would you leverage a button that destroys the world to make the world better?

Yoav Ravid

I’m Writ­ing a Book About Liberalism

I’m Writing a Book About Liberalism