This is such a good example of a straight forward question that achieves the exact opposite of its purpose. What do we want? Highly ethical people that are mission focused and willing to give up on economic upside for the mission. What are we going to get? Sociopaths who are perfectly happy lying to your face about their intentions, or sycophants who are going to tell you what you want to hear.
Do you know who has the best answer to a moral quandry they've had to navigate during their career? Liars! That's a really difficult question to answer if you're honest, it's a really easy question to answer if you're dishonest.
If you really want to pursue this strategy rather than setting up bullshit interview questions you could do something much more straight forward. Agree some standard of living that's acceptable for your employees - let's say 250k in the bay area. Give them that as cash comp, and everything else goes into a "fund" which gets paid out when specific milestones are achieved, as judged by some panel. Cure cancer? You all get 10% of your deferred comp.
If you want your employees to be prioritizing things other than stock price you can literally just encode that into your compensation strategy if you like!
Obviously no one would do that, because they don't actually want to give up the comp.
It's not difficult to define what curing cancer is, we've got tonnes of measures we can define. Let's define curing breast cancer - we have cured breast cancer if the 5 year survival rate is above 99% for all SEER stages, or less than 1 in 1000 women get diagnosed with TNM stage 1 or above. It's not that hard, it's just that deep down, they don't want to be judged on that basis.
Yeah but this is a conclusion you’d reach after a lot of studies have confirmed it and general consensus is that we’ve “cured cancer,” insofar as breast cancer, for instance, is no longer a personal or social concern at all. But testing that would take many years and there would not be a single point of inflection but rather a gradual forgetting of the illness as a cause for concern, similar to how Covid is today. So legally it would be very easy for a company to exploit this definition, claim the studies are not comprehensive enough, the statistical analysis biased, etc. etc., and really drag out the legal proceedings as long as possible and make it extremely painful for anyone to pursue their bonus. I don’t think Anthropic would do that but these sorts of things happen all the time especially when there is a lot of money involved, so tying compensation instead to something very concrete and not grounded in empirical determination, like stock valuation, makes it significantly easier. And since our society is grounded on the trade of commodities which can be given concrete valuations in exchange which are irrespective of their actual use value, the valuation of a companies stock is the only way to measure these things concretely.
Comments
This is such a good example of a straight forward question that achieves the exact opposite of its purpose. What do we want? Highly ethical people that are mission focused and willing to give up on economic upside for the mission. What are we going to get? Sociopaths who are perfectly happy lying to your face about their intentions, or sycophants who are going to tell you what you want to hear.
Do you know who has the best answer to a moral quandry they've had to navigate during their career? Liars! That's a really difficult question to answer if you're honest, it's a really easy question to answer if you're dishonest.
If you really want to pursue this strategy rather than setting up bullshit interview questions you could do something much more straight forward. Agree some standard of living that's acceptable for your employees - let's say 250k in the bay area. Give them that as cash comp, and everything else goes into a "fund" which gets paid out when specific milestones are achieved, as judged by some panel. Cure cancer? You all get 10% of your deferred comp.
If you want your employees to be prioritizing things other than stock price you can literally just encode that into your compensation strategy if you like!
Obviously no one would do that, because they don't actually want to give up the comp.
Also that would open you up to lawsuits galore, since “curing cancer” is not easily definable, but share price is.
It's not difficult to define what curing cancer is, we've got tonnes of measures we can define. Let's define curing breast cancer - we have cured breast cancer if the 5 year survival rate is above 99% for all SEER stages, or less than 1 in 1000 women get diagnosed with TNM stage 1 or above. It's not that hard, it's just that deep down, they don't want to be judged on that basis.
(Details of the definition of these terms: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/breast-cancer/understand...)
Yeah but this is a conclusion you’d reach after a lot of studies have confirmed it and general consensus is that we’ve “cured cancer,” insofar as breast cancer, for instance, is no longer a personal or social concern at all. But testing that would take many years and there would not be a single point of inflection but rather a gradual forgetting of the illness as a cause for concern, similar to how Covid is today. So legally it would be very easy for a company to exploit this definition, claim the studies are not comprehensive enough, the statistical analysis biased, etc. etc., and really drag out the legal proceedings as long as possible and make it extremely painful for anyone to pursue their bonus. I don’t think Anthropic would do that but these sorts of things happen all the time especially when there is a lot of money involved, so tying compensation instead to something very concrete and not grounded in empirical determination, like stock valuation, makes it significantly easier. And since our society is grounded on the trade of commodities which can be given concrete valuations in exchange which are irrespective of their actual use value, the valuation of a companies stock is the only way to measure these things concretely.