Yoav Ravid

Karma: 3,749

I’m writing a book about Liberalism. I call it 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 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 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 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
2 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-side 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
19 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
3 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?