Yoav Ravid

Karma: 3,587

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 Apr 5, 2025, 10:56 AM
6 points
4
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
0
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
−1
on: Thermodynamic entropy = Kolmogorov complexity
How does this relate to cross-entropy?

Yoav Ravid Jan 22, 2025, 9:30 PM
3 points
0
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
0
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
0
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
0
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
0
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
0
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
0
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
0
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
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.

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.