"Greater good arguments in AI safety" by Dean Valentine cover art

"Greater good arguments in AI safety" by Dean Valentine

"Greater good arguments in AI safety" by Dean Valentine

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Summary
 Back in the before-time of the 2010s, when EA was still known mostly for funding health efforts in the developing world, there were many baskets of criticism floating around from the left. The most prominent was a cluster centered around EAs being white men, and therefore suspicious. Another category, in my experience the second-most common, was that in attempting to rectify the problems in the world, EA was masking, whitewashing, and misdirecting efforts away from solving the "real problem", usually capitalism but often other contradictory forces.

These arguments were often not specific to EA, but applied to charitable giving in general. On any Hacker News post about a billionaire giving to charity, one of the first few comments would inevitably be this Oscar Wilde quote:

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

These arguments have a long history. Anticapitalist critiques of charity go back to [...]

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 22nd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WRvxRHMCmc3Qt4axz/greater-good-arguments-in-ai-safety

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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