Noting two very prominent downsides of this grant up front:
- This is a pretty expensive time buyout; it comes to ~$200/hour in my understanding. I think this is justifiable in reference to analogous labor (working through expensive technical staff + org overhead) but does compress the margin of this grant being worth it by quite a lot.
- I have a large COI with Parker; he is a close collaborator on recent projects, as noted above. It's not currently clear to me which projects Parker will work on in the near future, but it's at least plausible that he'll continue to work with my group at METR, and therefore plausible that this grant directly benefits me professionally (although not monetarily).
However, some upsides:
- I think that Parker is one of very few academic economists in the world focused on what I think are some of the most important questions in AI (the stuff we've worked on is close to timelines/capability assessment, but I know he's interested in at least RSI questions too). There are very few opportunities to buy time or leverage for these people. This is one such opportunity.
- Parker is productive. It's a bit difficult for me to justify this on Manifund, because I'm relying on a "making things happen inside projects" sense, not appealing to academic track-record or something. One example: for an upcoming project about mergeability vs algorithmic scoring on SWE-bench, Parker autonomously made maintainer-scored mergeability data happen quickly. For this kind of project, Parker could have been forgiven for not feeling on top of every detail about the subject area, and indeed I think many people would have responded to this situation by over-investing in understanding and under-invested in doing-stuff-quickly-and-iterating.
- Something about the shape of the above (getting informative but very imperfect answers to big questions quickly) is quite different to shape of many other academic economists, including people focused on big questions in AI. I think this is a helpful shape for doing high-value research in the area Parker is working on at the moment. One example: our paper on how compute growth slowdowns might translate to time horizon slowdowns, which Parker led, is kind of scrappy/I think has a bunch of room for improvement by typical academic standards. But I think it is leading people like e.g. Ben Todd to think more clearly about their timelines/making high-stakes debates more informed. I think we wouldn't add much to the debate at the margin if we reached for typical academic standards, whilst finishing up early does allow Parker to move on to other important questions sooner.
- I trust that Parker will return this money if it is not used on the intended purpose.
Overall, I'm excited to suggest this grant!
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General Career Support, Nov 2025
Another thing to say: it's not at all obvious to me that econ PhD work is the best use of Parker's time from my POV. I am not suggesting this grant because I want to support the econ PhD. I am suggesting this grant because I think the world would benefit from Parker having more freedom with his time, and this grant does that locally.