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.
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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.