Economist Writing Every Day

I don’t have much time to write this week because I lost so many work hours to schools closing for “weather.”

Tyler has been saying that we should welcome more intelligence (in the form of LLMs – I’m not getting any smarter). What would we want intelligence for? How about reducing the error rate on school closing?

First, I will recognize that things are already getting better due to computers. The internet and texting and radar help. Compared to when I was a child in New Jersey, it’s more efficient to text all the parents the night before, as opposed to having people get up at 6am to scan the radio for news. Weather forecasting has presumably gotten better.

Now my rant: Right around what was already a three-day official weekend, school was closed three times. Even my kids were irate when that last day was announced. In my opinion, only one of those closures was justified for extreme weather.

There is a lot of dumb in a city. People complain about routine processes being suboptimal. It would be great if we humans could figure out ways to apply more intelligence to these local problems and make less mistakes.

This is a joke for any readers in cold climates. My Alabama kids thought it was fun to collect icicles because they have almost never seen them before.