Yoav Ravid

Karma: 3,781

I’m writing a book about Liberalism. It’s titled Mechanisms of Liberty: The Shortcomings of Modern Liberalism and How to Fix It. I believe it offers a novel, robust, and comprehensive conception of Liberalism that is sorely missing.

My main interest is economic and governance mechanisms, my secondary interests include various core LW subjects, like rationality, epistemology, ethics, evolution, education, and cryptography.

I’m 25yo. I live in Israel. My hobbies include singing, playing guitar and drums, improv theatre, krav maga, dancing (salsa and bachata), acroyoga, debate (British parliamentary) 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 11 Jun 2026 16:08 UTC
4 points
2
on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
Maybe it’s because I haven’t taken the time to tune it right, but I feel like the new LW homepage serves me less relevant stuff than it did when it was just chronological for discussion, and the simple “magic” formula for posts, than it does now with the fancy recommendation algorithm.

Yoav Ravid 2 Jun 2026 12:16 UTC
4 points
−2
on: Comment on “Banning Said Achmiz”
I enjoyed this post and thinks it gives valid criticisms of the original decision and its justifications, as well as making important general points about LW. With that said, I think both this post and Habryka’s original post^[1] missed a valid reconciliation of the two ideals Habryka gave in his post—namely, that LW should be a place that forces you to get your arguments together, and that LW should be a rewarding place to engage with.
If the goal is to be less wrong through posting on Less Wrong, but posting LW is discouraging and unrewarding, then it hurts the initial goal of becoming LW. If the end goal is to become less wrong and your strategy or culture is in fact not conducive to people becoming less wrong, then it would constitute a failure. Just like two-boxing on Newcomb’s problem is wrong because it looses regardless of how supposedly virtuous your decision process is.
Given that we are humans, are far from perfectly rational, and have various factors, including social factors, that affect our ability to be rational in various situations, the rational thing to do is to take that into account when designing our environments and cultures, or choosing which environments and cultures to participate in or stay away from. Ben Pace and Habryka wrote about this in more detail.
In the case of LW, it means creating the sort of culture that both entices people to participate, and entices them to get their arguments together, since focusing one just one of these would result in losing both. If you only focus on being enticing, then LW may have lots of people, but they won’t become less wrong over time. If you only focus on forcing people to get their arguments together, then very few people will participate in the first place, except a tiny minority which seeks exactly that, and you will fail to raise the sanity waterline.
This frame doesn’t immediately give exact prescriptions for how LW’s culture should look like, or whether it was right to ban Said, but I think it’s a useful lens to look through.
(personally, I do tend towards the view that banning Said was excessive)
1. ^
  I read it at the time and don’t remember it framing this as I’m going to, but I haven’t re-read to make sure it hasn’t. If it has, I apologise in advance for misrepresenting it, and will happily edit the comment if pointed out.

Yoav Ravid 2 Jun 2026 8:25 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Sodium’s comment on: Comment on “Banning Said Achmiz”
fwiw, I feel the same as you about LW, but feel the same as Zack about Twitter

Yoav Ravid 5 Apr 2026 10:14 UTC
4 points
0
on: Chicken-Free Egg Whites
This is the best news I’ve heard in a long while! Thanks for sharing!

Yoav Ravid 1 Apr 2026 17:33 UTC
4 points
6
in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: Lesswrong Liberated
This doesn’t actually look like SSC?

Yoav Ravid 1 Apr 2026 17:32 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: Lesswrong Liberated
This is actually really cool, Kudos.

Yoav Ravid 1 Apr 2026 13:43 UTC
6 points
0
on: Lesswrong Liberated
PinWrong
Pintrest-like Frontpage (and just like Pintrest—it is super slow to load!)

Yoav Ravid 15 Mar 2026 21:01 UTC
4 points
0
on: Circular Reasoning
I think I see a similarity between ideal bayesianism and circular reasoning.
My understanding of ideal bayesianism is that it doesn’t actually deal with propositions and sequential reasoning, but compares complete world models against each other. World models don’t have parts which come before other parts, their nature is more similar to a circular chain of propositions than to a non-circular chain of propositions. Hence, comparing different world models is more similar to comparing different circular chains of propositions rather than non-circular chains of propositions.
Is there validity to this intuition?

Yoav Ravid 13 Mar 2026 22:27 UTC
3 points
0
on: Tradition
I wrote this page and then noticed that the Cultural knowledge tag also exists. It’s probably best to merge them some way. I’m wondering how.

Yoav Ravid 13 Mar 2026 12:22 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
Oh, one thing I’m missing is an indication of which posts I’ve read and which I haven’t, which existed in the previous profile design

Yoav Ravid 13 Mar 2026 12:20 UTC
6 points
4
on: On The Independence Axiom
Great post! I think it would have been even better if you gave a short of explanation of what the independence axiom is somewhere at the beginning. I only felt like I have some understanding of it when I reached this part (which is almost halfway through the post):
context-dependence of the utility function is precisely what the independence axiom forbids, because independence says your preference between sub-gambles should not depend on what else is in the package.

Yoav Ravid 13 Mar 2026 5:42 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Economic efficiency often undermines sociopolitical autonomy
Good time to notice confusion

Yoav Ravid 13 Mar 2026 5:36 UTC
6 points
0
on: Economic efficiency often undermines sociopolitical autonomy
LVT has always, since Henry George himself, been one half of a policy package, with the other part being what Henry George called the “citizen’s dividend”, most people today would call UBI (though that wouldn’t be precise), and I call Universal Natural Income (UNI).
Georgist policy proposals are rooted in two ideas. One, that land is a public resource and everyone is entitled to a slice of it. And second, that if you exclude the community from a piece of land, that’s fine, but you have to compensate them for being excluded. If you take all the money paid as compensation and distribute it equally between everybody, then everyone gets cash equivalent to the value of the slice of land they are entitled to, and can use it to pay compensation on a piece of land without ever worrying they will run out of money to pay for land (they might have to move to a different plot if the plot they’re on rises a lot in value, but they will always be able to find a plot with a value below or equal to the country’s land value per capita).
Georgists will differ in their views on how much LVT revenue should be distributed as UNI and how much should be spent by the government on public goods, but as long as a significant amount is distributed as UNI, the problem with LVT you pointed to in this post vanishes.

Yoav Ravid 8 Mar 2026 6:03 UTC
3 points
−1
on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
Love the new profile page design! It’s so fun seeing my top post in a large display right at the top! And the ability to easily browse all my comments is awesome.
A nice addition could be highlighting comments (choosing a few comments to display at the top of the comment section).

Yoav Ravid 7 Mar 2026 7:31 UTC
3 points
0
on: Sealed Predictions—A Solution.
This is really cool! It seems to have flown under the radar when first posted, so I hope this comments brings some attention to it.
For most sealed predictions it’s not really a problem that it isn’t end-to-end encrypted, but finding a way to make it so without retrieving a private key from the user it would be really cool.

Yoav Ravid 1 Mar 2026 20:11 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Amalthea’s comment on: Open sourcing a browser extension that shows when people are wrong on the internet
There’s already a web-wide community notes project, though I haven’t used it, so I don’t know how good it is.

Yoav Ravid 10 Feb 2026 5:25 UTC
4 points
−1
in reply to: Szeth’s comment on: Szeth’s Shortform
This would have been my expectation, from most likely to least likely:
- Doesn’t know Zvi, didn’t play magic
- Knows Zvi, didn’t play magic
- Knows Zvi, played magic
- Doesn’t know Zvi, played magic
I expect we differ only on the ordering of the middle two

Yoav Ravid 9 Feb 2026 5:47 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Szeth’s comment on: Szeth’s Shortform
I’m more surprised to learn Vance played MTG than to learn he knows ZVI

Yoav Ravid 27 Jan 2026 11:03 UTC
20 points
0
on: Ada Palmer: Inventing the Renaissance
Fun read! I would have loved to participate in such a game.
It reminded me of World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements, where the author recounts how he constructed a similarly grand game for his class of 4th graders.
Also, there’s a book by Erica Benner called Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading where she argues that Machiavelli’s writing style in The Prince is ironic, and what on the surface seems like suggestions for a prince on how to maintain his power, are actually traps for the unassuming prince. I wonder if Ada Palmer’s experiment can provide evidence for or against that reading of Machiavelli.

Yoav Ravid 20 Jan 2026 15:23 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Replaceable Axioms give more credence than irreplaceable axioms
No, I’m not talking about obfuscatory tricks of this sort. If you could replace A with T without also adding “T implies A” as an axiom, and still be able to prove A (an everything else you could have proved before, and nothing else you couldn’t prove before), that would be the sort of thing I’m talking about. Unfortunately I don’t know how to state this more precisely.
But perhaps an analogy could help—there’s a bunch of logic gates, and it turns out that some of them (NOR and NAND) can create every other logic gate if arranged correctly, while others can’t. So let’s say I build some circuit out of NANDs and someone blames me for “relying” on NANDs. In that case, I could show him that an equivalent circuit can be made out of NORs. I think before you learn the fact that both logic gates are universal, this would be a non-intuitive substitution.
When I talked to Abram he said that there’s probably many different formulations of number theory which logicians have proven equivalent to PA. I tried to quickly look for something like that to give as an example, but I’m really out of my depth (if I wasn’t I would have included such an example from the start).