Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 comments on Samin’s Quick takes

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

Did Good Ventures or Open Philanthropy Coefficient Giving sponsor WelcomeFest? What was the other conference you’re referring to?

I did a brief search, and I couldn’t find evidence of this. Are you sure you’re getting that right? I don’t know what other conference you’re referring to, so I couldn’t check that.

I also skimmed the list of grants here. I don’t recognize most of the names, but nothing jumped out to me as looking like a conference.

[Edited on Nov. 20, 2025 at 3:50 AM Eastern to add:

To save the reader the suspense (or the effort of scrolling down), Coefficient Giving did not sponsor WelcomeFest, but did sponsor another conference, Abundance 2025, which, to me, appears harmless and inoffensive, inasmuch as anything contentious in American politics today can be.

Some invitees may have some harmful or offensive views, but that will be true of any U.S. conference about politics or policy where a diversity of viewpoints representative of the country are allowed.]

(Disclaimer that I’m Canadian, so you may feel free to discount or downweight my opinions on U.S. politics as you like. Canada is in an unusual situation with regard to the U.S., where everything in U.S. politics casts a long shadow over Canada, so Canadians are unusually keyed into events in U.S. politics.)^[1] The unfortunate thing about U.S. politics, especially now, is that it’s an ugly, messy business that involves doing deals and forming coalitions with people you’d rather not associate with, in a ideal world where you had the freedom to choose that kind of thing. Democrats have to do deals with Republicans. Democrats have to build a coalition strong enough to resist authoritarianism, illiberalism, and democratic backsliding that includes people far apart from each other on the political spectrum, who have meaningful, substantive, and sometimes bitter disagreements, who in many cases have serious, legitimate grievances with each other. It’s unfortunate.

And, it should go without saying, to win elections going forward, Democrats have to win the votes of people who voted for Trump.

I think it’s completely legitimate to level this sort of critique against Manifold’s Manifest conference. First off, that’s a conference mainly for the Bay Area rationalist community and somewhat for the Bay Area EA community, and not a conference about U.S. national politics. So, it’s not about coalition building, winning over Republican voters, doing deals with Republican lawmakers, or anything like that.

Second, and more importantly, it’s an entirely different matter to want no association with someone like Curtis Yarvin (who threw an afterparty for the Manifest conference). Yarvin says things I think the median Republican voter would find repugnant and crazy. I can’t imagine the median Republican would have anything but rage or incredulity for the idea that America should become a “neo-monarchy”. Yes, Republican voters have been surprisingly tolerant of Trump’s illiberalism, and, yes, the Republican Party has both a recent problem with and a long history of racism, but people like Yarvin are still on the margins of the party, not at the median.

I think if Open Philanthropy Coefficient Giving or Good Ventures were funding something super controversial and alarming to a lot of people, like, I don’t know, research into genetically engineering babies with enhanced abilities, then it would be incumbent on the effective altruist community to give some kind of response to that. In that hypothetical, it would be important to clarify to the public that the community is a separate entity from Dustin Moskovitz’s and Cari Tuna’s organizations, and to clarify that this community doesn’t decide and can’t control what they fund. However, that’s not what is happening here.

Coefficient Giving’s work in this area is split into two parts, housing policy reform and metascience (or “innovation policy”, as they put it, but I prefer metascience). Housing policy reform is a popular, liberal, centre-left, mainstream idea in U.S. politics. This summer, the California State Assembly passed two bills that enact exactly the sort of housing policy reform that Coefficient Giving is trying to support. These bills were popular among California voters. 74% of voters expressed support for the bills in a poll, with 14% against and 11% unsure. Governor Gavin Newsom, who played a key role in the passage of the housing policy reform bills, has a 54% approval rating among Californians, compared to a 26% approval rating for Trump.

You can agree or disagree with housing policy reform, but it’s not a reputational risk for Coefficient Giving or for EA. It’s popular. People like it. People like the politicians who champion it. And people especially like the results, which is increased housing affordability.^[2]

What about the other half of Coefficient Giving’s “Abundance & Growth” focus area, metascience? I can’t imagine how metascience would pose reputational risks for anyone. Currently, metascience is not a partisan or polarized issue, and I pray it stays that way. The core idea of metascience is doing science on science: running experiments on different ways of doing science, particularly in terms of how research funding is allocated. Different institutions have different models for funding science. Compare, say, the NSF with DARPA. Nobody is saying the NSF should become like DARPA. What they are saying is that there should be experimentation with different funding models to find out what’s most effective.

Here’s a quote from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance which explains just one of the reasons why proponents of metascience think there is probably room for improvement:

To appreciate the explosion of scientific paperwork requirements, imagine if every scientist working in America contracted a chronic fatigue disorder that made it impossible for them to work for half of the year. We would consider this to be a national tragedy and an emergency. But this make-believe disorder is not so dissimilar to the burden we place on scientists today when it comes to paperwork. Today’s scientists spend up to 40 percent of their time working on filling out research grants and follow-up administrative documents, rather than on direct research. Funding agencies sometimes take seven months or longer to review an application or request a resubmission.

“Folks need to understand how broken the system is,” said John Doench, the director of research and development in functional genomics at the Broad Institute. “So many really, really intelligent people are wasting their time doing really, really uninteresting things: writing progress reports, or coming up with modular budgets five years in advance of the science, as if those numbers have any meaning. Universities have whole floors whose main job is to administer these NIH grants. Why are we doing this? Because they’re afraid that I’m going to buy a Corvette with the grant money?”

Bernie Sanders was recently asked about abundance liberalism in an interview with the New York Times. I think Sanders intended his response to be dismissive or critical, but he actually ended up acknowledging that Klein and Thompson are correct about their core argument. Sanders said:

Leonhardt: I know. Let’s talk about another debate that has gotten people excited — and I’m really curious about your view: the abundance debate. Which is this idea that one of the things that government needs to do and progressives need to do is clear out bureaucracy so that our society can make more stuff — homes, clean energy. What do you think of the abundance movement?

Sanders: Well, it’s got a lot of attention among the elite, if I may say so.

Leonhardt: Yes.

Sanders: Look, if the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy? Absolutely correct. It is terrible. Over the years, I brought a lot of money into the state of Vermont. It is incredible, even in a state like Vermont — which is maybe better than most states — how hard it is to even get the bloody money out! Oh, my God! We’ve got 38 meetings! We’ve got to talk about this. Unbelievable.

I worked for years to bring two health clinics that we needed into the state of Vermont. I wanted to renovate one and build another one. You cannot believe the level of bureaucracy to build a bloody health center. It’s still not built. All right? So I don’t need to be lectured on the nature of bureaucracy. It is horrendous, and that is real.

But that is not an ideology. That is common sense. Any manager — you’re a corporate manager, you’re a mayor, you’re a governor — you’ve got to get things done. And the bureaucracy — federal bureaucracy, many state bureaucracies — makes that very, very difficult. But that is not an ideology.

It’s good government. That’s what we should have. Ideology is: Do you create a nation in which all people have a standard of living? Do you have the courage to take on the billionaire class? Do you stand with the working class? That’s ideology. Breaking through bureaucracy and creating efficiencies? That’s good government.

Leonhardt: But it would be a meaningful change if states were able to reduce bureaucracy. It may not be an ideology, but it doesn’t happen today.

Sanders: Get things done!

Leonhardt: And you agree that we should do more of that?

Sanders: Absolutely.

Leonhardt: That we should have policy changes to simplify things, to deliver —

Sanders: I did my best when I was mayor — we’re a small city of 40,000 people — to break through the bureaucracy. And I was a good mayor. So there’s no question that you have people who it seems to be their function in life is to make sure things don’t happen. We should not be paying people to do that.

I take that as a ringing endorsement from Bernie Sanders for abundance liberalism. That’s actually one of the strongest endorsements of the Abundance thesis I’ve heard from any politician, possibly the strongest. Sanders is saying: what Klein and Thompson are arguing is so obviously correct, it’s common sense.

It was intended as a criticism, I think, but Sanders was essentially saying: you couldn’t be more wrong if you don’t see the truth in Klein and Thompson’s thesis about inefficient bureaucracy. If you don’t realize this is a real, horrendous problem in government, well, clearly, you’ve never been a mayor or a governor.

Sanders is of course correct that the idea of good government, of housing affordability, of metascience, of public infrastructure like high-speed rail built on budget and on time (by in-house, government-employed engineers, rather than private contractors), etc.^[3] is not a full political ideology. And abundance liberalism is not supposed to be a full political ideology. It’s a set of ideas that is supposed to fit in within the context of American liberalism. A complement to other ideas, not a replacement.

Some people have levelled the critique at Klein and Thompson: but economic populist policies are more popular with voters in polls than abundance policies. Klein and Thompson’s response: why not do both? They’re compatible, and politicians should do what their voters want them to do. For example, there’s no reason a city or a state can’t make it much easier to build housing, both affordable housing and market-rate, and also increase the funding it puts toward affordable housing, or mandate housing developers to build a certain ratio of affordable housing to market-rate housing — as long as you make it easier for them to build housing in the first place. (Ezra Klein has specifically endorsed this idea.)

I think, as with many big ideas, abundance liberalism is a ball that many different people, sometimes with quite different political orientations from each other, want to take and run with in their own direction. Bernie Sanders’ or Zohran Mamdani’s version of abundance might take a different shape than, say, for a moderate Democratic governor of a purple state. That’s normal. That’s politics. (It’s not perfect or ideal, but it’s the world we live in, and the one we’ve got to work with.)

I’m not particularly bothered if conservatives like the one you quoted want to “troll the libs” by misapplying the term “abundance” to things like deportations — I mean, it annoys me, but it doesn’t make me think abundance liberalism is a bad idea. Internet trolls always try to twist everything good and ruin it. (This is part of why I think Twitter is a waste of time, there’s just so much deliberate provocation and trying to be edgy or attention-grabbing.) I don’t know what conference you were referring to that he was invited to, [edit: it was Abundance 2025] but he works for a conservative policy think tank, and this gets back to my original point that policy conferences or political conferences will probably have to include people from across the political spectrum, from both major U.S. parties, like it or not.^[4]

Abundance liberalism can, in theory, be taken in a direction that people like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who coined the term, wouldn’t like and would never endorse. But so what? Anything could, and people try to do that with almost everything. It’s on us to be mindful and discerning. If we throw out every good idea in the world the second somebody tries to do something bad with it, we’ll have no good ideas. I don’t buy the idea that Coefficient Giving’s association with abundance liberalism is a reputational risk for EA because a) it’s popular (not just with voters, but with Democratic politicians from Gavin Newsom to Zohran Mamdani, and arguably even Bernie Sanders agrees with it in his own begrudging way), b) it’s a good idea (e.g. look at measures of housing affordability in places that have reduced bureaucracy and made it easier to build),^[2] and c) just because some people want to take it in a bad direction or tarnish its good name doesn’t mean they’ll succeed — they probably won’t.

You don’t have to agree that it’s a good idea. You don’t have to agree that it’s as popular as I’m making out — although I’d invite you to look at the polling for the California housing bills. But I really don’t see a plausible way this could be a reputational risk for EA. It’s politics, and, yeah, politics is controversial, but this is very mainstream, acceptable politics, getting funded by a large philanthropic organization that the EA community doesn’t control, which is currently in the process of broadening its donor base and its focus areas beyond effective altruism or what the EA community would choose to prioritize. What’s the big whoop?

1. ^

   If you want to know my political orientation, I’m LGBT, I voted for the New Democratic Party (NDP) in the most recent Canadian federal election, I enjoyed the economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and I’m a big fan of Ezra Klein, so whatever that tells you.

2. ^

   In Minneapolis, Minnesota: “Using a synthetic control approach we find that the reform lowered housing cost growth in the five years following implementation: home prices were 16% to 34% lower, while rents were 17.5% to 34% lower relative to a counterfactual Minneapolis constructed from similar metro areas.”
   
   In Austin, Texas: “The median asking rent in Austin dropped 10.7% year over year to $1,420 in March — $379 below its record high. ”

3. ^

   These are all examples taken from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance book. It’s particularly important to note that they advocate for the government of California to employ its own engineers in-house — government employees, not private contractors — to complete its long-languishing high-speed rail project.
   
   This is just one example of several strongly anti-neoliberal stances Klein and Thompson take in the book. Another example is their strong support of government science funding (see the chapter about metascience). A third example is their strong advocacy of industrial policy, particularly around sustainable energy. In addition to these specific anti-neoliberal stances, the book also includes a section explicitly criticizing neoliberalism.
   
   I bring this up because one of the most common critiques of the book I’ve seen online is that it’s “neoliberal”. This is why you should read books, rather than read tweets about books from people who haven’t read them. I largely believed these criticisms before I read the book and then was furious when, upon reading it, I found out I had been misled by people who didn’t read the book.

4. ^

   I don’t know if this analogy will help or hurt, but an analogy that makes sense in my head is falling birth rates. Falling birth rates is also a ball different people of different political persuasions can run with in different directions. From a feminist and welfare state/​social democratic perspective, you can see falling birth rates — particularly in conjunction with people saying they want to have kids, but it’s too difficult — and think about how the government can better support parents or prospective parents, particularly from the angle of gender equality. Women often say they want to have kids, but are daunted by taking on the additional care work and domestic work of parenting when they already have a career — which might be impacted by having a kid. This can be a concern for men, too, but unequally so, because of the unequal burden of parenting and domestic work that falls on women. What policies could conceivably improve this situation and allow women who want to have kids to do so? This is an incredibly liberal, progressive, social democratic perspective on the issue.
   
   On the other hand, some conservatives have expressed strange ideas about how to address falling birth rates, like trying to make people more religious. Even assuming that people becoming more religious would make them have more kids, I don’t know how you make people more religious. I especially don’t know how you make them more religious not because God exists and you want them to have a good relationship with him, but because you want them to have more babies. In any case, this is an entirely opposite response to the feminist, pro-government response I outlined above.
   
   Some liberals or people on the left argue that liberals/​the left shouldn’t even discuss declining birth rates because to do so is to automatically support regressive political responses, like an attempted to return to historical levels of religiosity or restrictions on abortion. I think this is incredibly misguided. Ignoring an issue that affects people’s lives in a big way, or pretending that issue doesn’t exist, is not an acceptable political response. That is a betrayal of the public, of the people, by politicians. That is also the kind of thing that loses politicians elections, and gives power to opposing politicians who have more regressive policy ideas, like banning abortion.

[huw]

The ‘deportation abundance’ guy, Charles Lehman, was not merely associating abundance with deportations in a stray tweet—he was a speaker on a panel at Abundance 2025. He himself claims to be not associated with the abundance coalition.

(I’m not taking a position here on whether I think Abundance 2025 should have invited speakers it explicitly disagrees with, or whether my impression is that Abundance 2025 endorses or disendorses his views—just correcting you on that specific point)

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

Yes, I believed you when you said he was invited to a conference related to abundance. I was just saying he doesn’t represent abundance liberalism.

First, he’s a conservative, so he isn’t even a liberal in the first place. Second, you very helpfully linked to that book review where he says Klein and Thompson’s Abundance book is “fundamentally misguided” and that “a ‘politics of abundance’ is an oxymoron”.

This confirms what I said above that this guy is just “trolling the libs” by intentionally misusing the word “abundance”. This should not be a relevant consideration for whether Open Philanthropy Coefficient Giving wants to support policy reform related to abundance liberalism. But I think your point is just about sponsoring the conference.

If you have political conferences or policy conferences where you invite conservatives and Republicans, it’s going to be pretty much impossible to avoid inviting people who have offensive or problematic views, since that is core to the Republican Party and mainstream American conservatism right now. I don’t see how associating with Republicans or conservatives in some way is avoidable if a philanthropic organization like Open Philanthropy Coefficient Giving wants to be involved in politics or policy. Everyone in politics/​policy has to in some way, including Democratic lawmakers.

And it doesn’t seem like there’s any good alternative.

[huw]

I’ll look at this properly later but just wanted to confirm that I got it wrong about WelcomeFest. I’d read a tweet about Open Philanthropy sponsoring Abundance 2025 around the same time WelcomeFest was happening, and conflated the two due to having similar speakers and an explicit pro-abundance position.

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

Okay, yes, Open Philanthropy is listed as one of the sponsors of the Abundance 2025 conference that took place in Washington, D.C. in September. Is this a problem for any reason? Was there anything about that conference that was troubling or controversial? What’s the reputational risk, here?

[Matrice Jacobine🔸🏳️‍⚧️]

I’m giving a ∆ to this overall, but I should add that conservative AI policy think tanks like FAI are probably overall accelerating the AI race, which should be a worry for both AI x-risk EAs and near-term AI ethicists.

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

FAIR, as in the Meta AI group? Which FAIR?

[Matrice Jacobine🔸🏳️‍⚧️]

Sorry, I don’t know where I got that R from.

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

Okay, thanks, so FAI — the Foundation for American Innovation. What’s the relation between FAI and Open Philanthropy Coefficient Giving? Has Coefficient Giving given grant money to FAI?

Oh, you must just be referring to the fact that FAI “co-hosted” the Abundance 2025 conference. I actually have no idea what the list of “co-hosts” on the website means — there are 15 of them. I have no context for what this means.

[Matrice Jacobine🔸🏳️‍⚧️]

Yes.

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

You disapprove even of those grants related to AI safety?

For me, it’s all very theoretical because AI capabilities currently aren’t very consequential for good or for ill, and the returns to scaling compute and data seem to be very much in decline. So, I don’t buy that either immediate-term, mundane AI safety or near-term AI x-risk is a particularly serious concern.

There are some immediate-term, mundane concerns with how chatbots talk to users with certain kinds of mental health problems, and things of that nature, but these are comparatively small problems in the grand scheme of things. Social media is probably 10x to 1,000x more problematic.

[Matrice Jacobine🔸🏳️‍⚧️]

Social media recommendation algorithms are typically based on machine learning and generally fall under the purview of near-term AI ethics.

[Yarrow Bouchard 🔸]

Uh huh, you got me on a technicality. Let me clarify that I see the social problems associated with social media, including the ML-based recommender systems they use, as far more consequential than the social problems associated with LLM-based chatbots.

The recommender systems are one part of why social media is problematic, but not nearly the whole story.

I think looking at the problems of social media through the lens of “AI safety” would be too limiting and not helpful.