Yoav Ravid

Karma: 3,599

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 May 31, 2025, 7:19 PM
2 points
0
on: House Party Dances
I wonder, what do you think is the best dance or mix of dances to learn to be able to dance with other people no matter which dances they’ve learned or whether they’ve learned to dance at all?
I learned some West Coast Swing and really liked it, but I also feel like it kinda requires even the follower to be familiar with it, so it doesn’t give me a lot of freedom outside a WCS context.

Yoav Ravid May 23, 2025, 8:26 AM
2 points
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in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
Nice :)
While you’re at it, maybe make it so when you close the comments from the side it scrolls you back up to the post?

Yoav Ravid May 23, 2025, 3:07 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
@habryka

Yoav Ravid May 22, 2025, 5:48 AM
6 points
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on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
It would be nice if when opening the comments of a post on the frontpage, clicking between comments wouldn’t close the post :)
I keep accidentally clicking there, and the post close, and I have to scroll up to open it again, then scroll down to find the comment I was reading.

Yoav Ravid May 15, 2025, 11:17 AM
4 points
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in reply to: philh’s comment on: Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
I had the same reaction to the first version

Yoav Ravid May 15, 2025, 7:31 AM
6 points
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on: Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
I initially read the title of the post as
Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Anyone Reads It, Everyone Dies
Quite intimidating!

Yoav Ravid Apr 5, 2025, 10:56 AM
6 points
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in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
The quoting policy seems very good and clever :)

Yoav Ravid Mar 26, 2025, 8:49 AM
4 points
2
in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: Will Jesus Christ return in an election year?
I don’t think there’s a way to resolve it? It will basically always be a prediction on the reliability of the statement.

Yoav Ravid Feb 17, 2025, 7:00 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Thermodynamic entropy = Kolmogorov complexity
Isn’t that significant?

Yoav Ravid Feb 17, 2025, 2:13 PM
3 points
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on: Thermodynamic entropy = Kolmogorov complexity
How does this relate to cross-entropy?

Yoav Ravid Jan 22, 2025, 9:30 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Martin Sustrik’s comment on: Per Tribalismum ad Astra
Yeah, that’s certainly a possibility, but I think it’s still worth exploring in case there is a way they can complement each other.

Yoav Ravid Jan 20, 2025, 3:16 PM
3 points
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on: Per Tribalismum ad Astra
Very much like greed powers markets to produce wealth, tribalism powers the “bridging” algorithm to produce societal trust
We also have a system that uses greed to produce societal trust in information—prediction markets. Could we combine both somehow? What if we used bridging-based ranking on a prediction market data? Would giving more weight to similar bets by people who bet differently on other things make prediction markets even more accurate and trustworthy?

Yoav Ravid Jan 20, 2025, 12:39 PM
2 points
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on: Per Tribalismum ad Astra
I looked into bridging-based ranking a bit more. The term seems to have been introduced in Aviv Ovadya’s paper from 2022. Aviv and his partner Luke Thorburn have a website dedicated to Bridging systems. And this article seems like a good explanation of the concept and how it’s applied in community notes.
I haven’t found applications to voting.

Yoav Ravid Jan 19, 2025, 3:11 PM
19 points
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on: Per Tribalismum ad Astra
Are there voting systems which function similarly to their bridging algorithm?
e.g, approval voting, but if I get a vote from two people whose other votes are different then it counts more?

Yoav Ravid Dec 21, 2024, 12:34 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Karl Krueger’s comment on: I’m Writing a Book About Liberalism
Right, that was never the intention. I actually think there’s something noble about them realizing and expressing the ideal values even though they fell short of them. It would be very easy to rationalize their shortcomings, as most people do and did all throughout history. Instead, they left an unfulfilled ideal as legacy for future generations to fulfill. That dream was their gift to tomorrow.

Yoav Ravid Dec 20, 2024, 8:54 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Karl Krueger’s comment on: I’m Writing a Book About Liberalism
Yes, this will be discussed in more length inside the book. But I think by saying that our civilization is founded on the idea I am implying its aspirational nature as you suggested, rather than claiming it is fully realised (indeed, the point of my book is exactly that it still isn’t). And if we look at the US I think it’s literally true that it has been “founded” (as in, “the founding of the united states”) on this idea, since it is stated in the deceleration of independence (though phrased very differently, of course)

Yoav Ravid Dec 20, 2024, 8:37 AM
3 points
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in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Replaceable Axioms give more credence than irreplaceable axioms
Hmm… I’m not sure I see the connection, honestly. But thanks for the comment :)

Yoav Ravid Dec 19, 2024, 7:28 PM
2 points
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in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
I don’t think comparing 5 to 7 is correct, because we don’t want to compare to downvote to no-vote, we want to compare one ordering of votes to another ordering of votes. So, what would be the difference if it went up before it went back down again, rather than first go down like it has.
I think we do agree that if I didn’t ask why it was downvoted it would have remained at 5 rather than go up to 15, and that this is suboptimal, right?
To me it feels like mid-popularity posts are affected too much by noise and when they get posted.

Yoav Ravid Dec 19, 2024, 6:16 PM
2 points
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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
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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