I’ve had several people get in touch worried to socialise at Xmas because of ‘mutant super flu’. In an era of fragile trust in health, it does feel irresponsible for NHS to be issuing press releases with made up terms like ‘super flu’.

How good is your intuition for exponential growth?

I've started compiling a weekly digest of the interesting and thought-provoking things I come across on Substack. Here's the 2nd installment, spanning everything from education to epidemiology and major fiction to model fitting: kucharski.substack.com/p/things-ive...

I feel I'm quite heavily behind the run rate on mince pies and mulled wine this year...

AND THE PHYSICS FANS GO WILD*! www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricke... *with muttering and disgruntlement

How many gifts are there in the Twelve Days of Christmas? And how does it relate to Blaise Pascal's mathsy Christmas tree? Find out here: kucharski.substack.com/p/twelve-day...

Looks like @rozeggo.bsky.social has narrowly edged me in the latest 'ScholarGPS' ranking...

Tired of spam or juggling multiple email addresses for test projects? Lots of email providers (e.g. Gmail, Outlook) support plus-addressing. For example, if you sign up using [email protected], the website treats it as a unique address, but emails are still delivered to [email protected].

"The real world does not conform to the mathematical tidiness of simple scenarios" - @adamjkucharski.bsky.social, "Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty" Great book so far, thanks for writing it.

New study out in Nature Communications! In this paper, we disentangle the impact of climate variation and serotype changes on dengue dynamics in Singapore and present a forecasting framework able to predict outbreaks up to two months ahead 🦟 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My top 10 books for 2025

What happens when exponential problems - and exponential opportunities - hit a world that’s been taught to think linearly? And how can we do better? New video, made with the support of the TED Fellow program: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKx...

Lots of PhD positions on @iddjobs.org with Jan deadlines:

We don’t want to believe things that are false, but we don’t want to reject things that are true. How can we balance these two errors, from science and medicine to justice and social media? Subscribe to stay updated! www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXbd...

It was Paul Fine’s retirement lecture at LSHTM last week. He’s had a fascinating career, and I’ve learned a huge amount from him over the years. A key takeaway for me: it’s worth making most of interesting & unexpected opportunities when they arise, even if they push you outside your comfort zone.

What does a trio of non-fiction writing marathons look like?

Initially thought this meant training people to use AI, but AAAHHHH they meant tagging data and correcting chatbots for $$ per hour...

Lots of flu about, but what makes a ‘winter virus’ a winter virus? My piece on seasonality, evolution and behaviour: kucharski.substack.com/p/is-covid-n...

Great to see the seroanalytics.org collection expanding with @dchodge.bsky.social 's work on seroCOP (R package for analysing correlates of protection using Bayesian methods)

The worst charts I've ever seen at work

Delighted that TED have selected my talk on uncertainty, trust and explanation as one of their ‘Talks to boost your brain in 2026’:

I see GPT-5.2 is launching next week

Final orders for anyone who wants to comment (or like a comment!)

Where should we set the bar for evidence? Excited to share the first in new video series, made with the support of TED Fellows. These initial videos give short, sharp overview in 4-6 mins. But would love to hear what you find valuable. Longer deep dives? More frequent short clips? Let me know!

How do large language models interpret words relating to probability like “unlikely,” “probably,” or “almost certain"? The below shows what happens when we compare judgements from different models to a benchmark dataset of human judgments (data from: github.com/zonination/p...).

Is it worse to believe too much or doubt too much? Launching on YouTube tomorrow! www.youtube.com/@adamjkuchar...

Science and health are screwed. Or are they? Latest post: kucharski.substack.com/p/science-is...

I used to think that people use the “weasel word causal inference strategy” (“our analyses show that X is an important predictor of…” followed by conclusions that are clearly causal) for the sake of plausible deniability. But I’m revising that now, because often deniability *isn’t* plausible.>

What is strange about the value £21.5 million? My piece on a runaway algorithm, a Christmas mystery and a great bit of reverse engineering insight: kucharski.substack.com/p/a-bit-of-a...

“We reveal a troubling trade- off: When AI systems are optimized for persuasion, they may increasingly deploy misleading or false information.” www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨 AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp 🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK 🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks) 🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy 🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate

Arriving Monday! Subscribe now to keep updated: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZbr...

Latest post, testing out Nano Banana on my son’s adventures… kucharski.substack.com/p/nano-banan...

My son is having a public health strategy for his packed lunch today.

If you're an expert in your field but still occasionally feel a tinge of imposter syndrome, just have a look at some of the current ACIP lineup.

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Share your Christmassy Science!

To mark Proof being an FT Book of the Year, I’m giving away 2 copies in run up to Xmas – prize will go to the quirkiest, funniest, or most interesting Christmas-related science.
 Comment below – most likes by 8th Dec wins (Europe/US only). To kick things off, here's Galton's 1906 Nature letter:

Had a quick go at fitting a GAM and showing the 95% interval for each 'peak':

Noisy data + single smoothing curve = overly precise conclusions about where the peaks land. www.cam.ac.uk/stories/five...

Good blog which raises some of the questions that the inquiry seems sadly to be missing. The key point for me is towards the end: if we conclude from COVID-19 that pandemic preparedness is about epidemiological models, PPE, or healthcare capacity, we weren't paying attention.

The UK isn’t prepared for the next pandemic – and nor are many other countries. kucharski.substack.com/p/we-arent-p...

It's remarkable how many of the negative online reviews for Proof are because I describe the Jan 2021 riot at the Capitol building as, well, a riot. You know, that riot we all watched happening in real-time. There are some serious and strong attempts at revisionism at play these days.

How can we make sense of a noisy, uncertain world? I’ve spent lots of time writing online about this topic, and speaking in person. So I thought it was time to combine the two… Excited to launch soon, thanks to support of TED Fellows. Subscribe now to stay updated: www.youtube.com/@adamjkuchar...

Can everyone just stop posting muddled Nano Banana infographics of papers they've read? Share what *you* think about it!

How can we make sense of a noisy, uncertain world? I’ve spent lots of time writing online about this topic, and speaking in person. So I thought it was time to combine the two… Excited to launch soon, thanks to support of TED Fellows. Subscribe now to stay updated: www.youtube.com/@adamjkuchar...

It's lucky the UK doesn't have any key industries or services reliant on this kind of immigration. *checks notes* Oh...

To mark Proof being an FT Book of the Year, I’m giving away 2 copies in run up to Xmas – prize will go to the quirkiest, funniest, or most interesting Christmas-related science.
 Comment below – most likes by 8th Dec wins (Europe/US only). To kick things off, here's Galton's 1906 Nature letter:

Making emails much easier to write and send with AI will make us all more productive, will it? My inbox says otherwise...

I think this is probably right and also a complete disaster. Just an utter unwilligness to learn from what we all collectively went through just a few years ago…