Yoav Ravid

Karma: 3,713

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 27 Jan 2026 11:03 UTC
9 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).

Yoav Ravid 20 Jan 2026 11:47 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Replaceable Axioms give more credence than irreplaceable axioms
re PA: I mean a statement that we would intuitively see as non-trivially different, not merely the same statement with “and 1=1” added.
re 3: I’m not asking if we can have a worldview independent of any assumptions at all. I’m asking if we can have a worldview independent of any specific assumptions. That is, among the various sets of assumptions we can use to justify our worldview, there’s no assumption that’s common to all sets (i.e, always required to justify the worldview).

Yoav Ravid 20 Jan 2026 7:44 UTC
4 points
0
on: Replaceable Axioms give more credence than irreplaceable axioms
Unfortunately this post hasn’t gotten much attention, but I do think it offers some value to the conversation. Its main weakness is that it’s very hypothetical, and it would have been better if I could have made it more formal and concrete. Also I could have probably wrote it better.
I sent the post to @abramdemski and @Gordon Seidoh Worley; Abram said it looks totally correct, and Gordon said it’s thinking in the right direction.
I think this post makes an important observation which hasn’t been made elsewhere (at least on LW) - even if any worldview has to make assumptions, we should (all else being equal) prefer worldviews that are more flexible about which assumptions they make. Ideally, we should have a worldview that doesn’t require any specific assumption at all.
For specific beliefs, we should look for many ways to justify them which don’t all rest on the same set of assumptions. Both for ourselves, to know we don’t depend on that assumption, and for others, so when they tell us “Ok, but you assume X”, we can suggest instead a different justification which rests on a different assumption.

Yoav Ravid 27 Sep 2025 9:41 UTC
4 points
0
on: The Illustrated Petrov Day Ceremony
Is there a PDF of the illustrated version for printing?

Yoav Ravid 12 Sep 2025 14:57 UTC
2 points
0
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
3
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
16
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
0
on: Hemingway Case
Hemincase/Hemin.Case for short?

Yoav Ravid 31 May 2025 19:19 UTC
4 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 23 May 2025 8:26 UTC
2 points
0
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
0
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
@habryka

Yoav Ravid 22 May 2025 5:48 UTC
6 points
0
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
3
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
0
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
4
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
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 17 Feb 2025 19:00 UTC
2 points
0
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
−1
on: Thermodynamic entropy = Kolmogorov complexity
How does this relate to cross-entropy?

Yoav Ravid 22 Jan 2025 21:30 UTC
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.