I'm grateful to Jonathan for writing this and very pleased to publish it in Works in Progress – he does great work, and I like him and respect his views immensely. I have two thoughts in response. One is that I am not hugely compelled by people telling others what they should focus on. As long as you're not doing active harm to the world, it's fine to work on a less high-priority area than you could. Comparative advantage is not always easy to judge from outside and part of living a satisfying life is doing what you find most intrinsically interesting and rewarding. And entrepreneurship is *inherently* about working on things that other people underrate! There wouldn't be any opportunities for discovery if it was clear exactly what everyone should focus their time on. (I don't have much time for people who complain that a handful of EAs are worried about shrimp welfare either, unless they are actually hurting the shrimp.) Two: even if you concede Jonathan's argument that encouraging nice buildings and places does not instrumentally advance the cause of YIMBYism – we can agree to disagree – I think that it is a mistake to dismiss aesthetics as being trivial. People want beauty and pleasure in their lives, not just boxes to sleep and work in. Cities should be amazing places to be, and the way they look and feel is a big part of that. The greatest cities I have been to are Paris, London, Tokyo, and New York, all of which are breathtakingly beautiful cities in their own way, even though some of them create that beautiful whole from various ugly parts arranged well. I think this is often true of parts of London, where individually ugly buildings nonetheless combine to make a beautiful skyline or street. The best places, like inner Paris and lower Manhattan, combine beautiful streetscapes with individually-beautiful buildings. If you think too much about "units of housing" and not enough about which places people most want to live in and visit, you will miss a lot of what actually matters to people about the places they live and visit. It is a constant error to think that the "function" of buildings and cities does not include "being pleasant and looking nice". This is all obviously subjective, but so are lots of other important things that still benefit from some form of collective decision making – pollution, noise, public order, the provision of public goods. The interesting meta-question to me is what institutions allow for the best ways to make these decisions and resolve conflicts between people.