Yoav Ravid

Karma: 3,657

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 12 Sep 2025 14:57 UTC
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in reply to: EffectiveAdvocate’s comment on: Building Blocks of Politics: An Overview of Selectorate Theory
Thanks for the comment! You’re correct, I did miss that when writing the post. They do mention in their work that there should be a difference between different parliamentary systems (though the empirical work they’ve done at the time of the book’s publication didn’t differentiate between them). I most places they don’t clearly say which one should have a large coalition size, like in this part (emphasis mine):
Not all competitive electoral systems are alike in the required size of the winning coalition. First-past-the-post parliamentary systems, for instance, require a winning coalition equal to only about one-quarter or less of the selectorate. If such a system has only two political parties and the prime minister requires support from half of the legislators in order to remain in power, and each legislator needs approximately a simple majority to be elected, then the prime minister needs support from one-half of the legislators, each of whom needed support from one-half of his or her constituents in order to be elected. Thus the prime minister only needs support from one-fourth of the voters. If there are more than two viable political parties, then the prime minister needs an even smaller percentage of the selectorate in order to remain in power. In many proportional-representation systems the size of the winning coalition can be substantially smaller than one-quarter.
This makes it sound like proportional representation is worse than FPTP/Single Member Districtrs.
but in one of the notes they do state it clearly:
we expect list-voting parliamentary systems to behave in a manner similar to direct-election presidential systems, but we anticipate that winner-take-all, single-member district parliamentary systems behave in a manner consistent with regimes that have a smaller winning coalition than do presidential systems or list systems.
I added an explanation of this to the Presidential VS Parliamentary Democracy section. Thanks!

Yoav Ravid 17 Aug 2025 9:42 UTC
3 points
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on: Somebody invented a better bookmark
The second disadvantage is that you lose the opportunity to have a tiny bit of art in your life. Paper bookmarks are often beautiful.
It’s possible to make ones with engraving, and to have a more special shape

Yoav Ravid 3 Jul 2025 19:14 UTC
28 points
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on: IABIED: Advertisement design competition
Have the authors or the publishers considered changing the cover design?

Yoav Ravid 3 Jun 2025 9:12 UTC
4 points
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on: Hemingway Case
Hemincase/Hemin.Case for short?

Yoav Ravid 31 May 2025 19:19 UTC
4 points
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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 23 May 2025 8:26 UTC
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 23 May 2025 3:07 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
@habryka

Yoav Ravid 22 May 2025 5:48 UTC
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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 15 May 2025 11:17 UTC
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 15 May 2025 7:31 UTC
8 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 5 Apr 2025 10:56 UTC
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 26 Mar 2025 8:49 UTC
4 points
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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 17 Feb 2025 19:00 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Thermodynamic entropy = Kolmogorov complexity
Isn’t that significant?

Yoav Ravid 17 Feb 2025 14:13 UTC
3 points
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on: Thermodynamic entropy = Kolmogorov complexity
How does this relate to cross-entropy?

Yoav Ravid 22 Jan 2025 21:30 UTC
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 20 Jan 2025 15:16 UTC
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 20 Jan 2025 12:39 UTC
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 19 Jan 2025 15:11 UTC
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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 21 Dec 2024 0:34 UTC
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 20 Dec 2024 8:54 UTC
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)