Adam Kucharski
Epidemiologist/mathematician. Professor at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Author of The Rules of Contagion and The Perfect Bet. Views own.
New book Proof: The Uncertain Science of Certainty available now: proof.kucharski.io
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- Almost 4000 people have done this quiz so far, although younger groups still under-represented in case you know anyone who'd like to give it a go and see how they compare to others! probability.kucharski.io
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- What can Hemingway teach us about information compression? New post: kucharski.substack.com/p/what-hemin...
- AI agent deleted all my files will become the new dog ate my homework.
- Quickly telling someone you’ve liked something they’ve done (e.g. telling a writer you like their writing, or a researcher you like their research, or a teacher you like their teaching) has a phenomenally high effort-to-impact ratio.
- Throwback to this classic exchange:
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- Latest post, on reading-to-revise: kucharski.substack.com/p/the-pop-qu...
- New post, on the pop quizification of knowledge: kucharski.substack.com/p/the-pop-qu...
- Survey by RIFF science (Research and Invention for the Future) on higher-risk innovation funding opportunities: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
- My toddler will be pleased to hear about this new research: bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/5/1/...
- Has Apple just stopped thinking about UX? Why, after years of users getting familiar with button positions in Safari, would you shift the menu higher so it’s A) not where habit expects it and B) sitting on top of content? Also had to press 3 buttons to take a screenshot. Baffling design choices.
- New post, on that time I almost failed one of my first year university mathematics exams: kucharski.substack.com/p/when-does-...
- Some things I've been reading this past week or so – from angry Tudors to AI tutors kucharski.substack.com/p/things-ive...
- Daisy Fancourt has done some fascinating work at the intersection of social behaviour, psychology and epidemiology (we were both British Science Association award lecturers, and I was on advisory group for her COVID Social Study). Her new book is a great read so far, and looks like others agree!
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- Throw back to 10 years ago this week, when I went on This Morning to talk about lottery maths and tried to stay composed while the person next to me mixed up correlations about who has won previously with causal advice about how to win...
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- This makes sense. Think it's similar to what would happen if all scientific groups suddenly had 100 new interns who needed very clear instructions – they would focus on the narrow parts of science where this arrangement would be productive rather than chaos: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- New post, on how AI is coming for open source software: kucharski.substack.com/p/will-your-...
- "Does this handle survival plots too?" asked @load-dependent.bsky.social Yes it does! See below for RECOVERY. Only catch is it doesn't like the dotted lines that appear in some survival plots (because the PDF geometry treats this as lots of little separate lines rather than one single entry).
- Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version? I made an app you might like: adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/ It all started a few years ago... 🧵
- Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version? I made an app you might like: adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/ It all started a few years ago... 🧵
- I originally made a somewhat popular R package that allowed users to extract the underlying geometry of a PDF figure, so they could get the exact data points that went into the original figure. (Handy for public health emergencies, when governments often release crucial data in PDF figures.)
- Tried this prompt again with Gemini 3...
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- Can you spot what's odd about this AI-generated gravity model? And could AI have spotted it too? More in my recent post on verifiably 'correct' code: kucharski.substack.com/p/is-halluci...
- Almost at 3000! probability.kucharski.io
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- How do we know if one thing causes another? A (very) brief history of cause and effect, from stories about witchcraft to the science of clinical trials and observation studies: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mlZ...
- New post, on what happened when MIT ran a for-credit poker class: kucharski.substack.com/p/what-a-for...
- 6 years ago this Jan, I'd been hanging out in the Galapagos with these eerily prescient signs...
- Epidemiology fans will also notice that you don't see exponential growth here (i.e. what you'd get from a gradual repost-then-rerepost chain of sharing over time). Instead, it's the hallmark of large 'broadcast' shares from popular accounts that then fades away.
- Great to see so many people engaging with the perceptions of probability quiz at probability.kucharski.io!
- Great to see so many people engaging with the perceptions of probability quiz at probability.kucharski.io!
- Interesting new paper on value of serological surveillance for reconstructing epidemics: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... And accompanying comment by @scauchemez.bsky.social: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
- My second son is now same age as when I wrote this about my first. A great age (even if the wake ups are very early) – kucharski.substack.com/p/learning-f...
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- There's a bonus anecdote in my latest post for fans of gravity models and railways…
