Notices by Kit Yates (kityates@mas.to)

"RFK is unwilling to admit that he made a miscalculation or simply misunderstood percentages. Seemingly, this regime would prefer to try to rewrite the fundamental rules of mathematics rather than climb down over a simple mistake."

My latest substack.

https://open.substack.com/pub/kityates/p/then-they-came-for-mathematics-again?r=1cw8pl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Headline of the Day.

Some good news.
“A vaccine during pregnancy which protects newborns against nasty chest infections (RSV) is cutting hospital admissions of babies by more than 80%, UK health officials say.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g84nxwz8wo

Wonder how FIFA are feeling about that "Peace Prize" they gave out?

I thought he didn’t need NATO help?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ce84073mr06t?post=asset%3A6bfa211f-2602-4b7c-a84e-33fd90ffb9e0#post

One in five children infected in the recent London measles outbreak were reportedly hospitalised.
Don’t believe the anti-vaxxers when they say “it’s a mild disease” or “it’s better to get immunity naturally”.
It isn’t.

“Seven schools and a nursery have reported more than 60 suspected cases of measles in an area of north London, and labs have confirmed 34 cases since January 12. Some children have been treated in hospital.”
https://archive.md/2026.02.14-170223/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/measles-outbreak-london-vaccination-9b78p2kb2

Great to see my friend Christina Pagel featured in the THE for her work on tracking Trump's authoritarian actions.
"Scientist behind Trump Action Tracker uses skills in data collection to look for patterns in president’s seemingly scattergun approach"
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/mathematician-lifting-lid-trumps-attacks

A couple of weeks ago I had the BBC Crowd Science team over - producer Emily Knight & presenter Alex Lethbridge - to talk about probability in all its surprising forms.
We ended up diving deep into patterns, biases, and randomness itself.
Listen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct6sv0
2/10

While I can’t speak for the producers (they explain their reasoning on the programme), it seemed to me the issue was our species’ difficulty with randomness.
A major theme of my second book How to Expect the Unexpected:
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/how-to-expect-the-unexpected-the-science-of-making-predictions-and-the-art-of-knowing-when-not-to-kit-yates/7328813?ean=9781529408690
4/10

They wanted to answer a question from Griffith in Ghana about Unexpected Elements (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p016tmt2).
He’d noticed the quiz answers were often B or C, but rarely A—and wanted to know why.
3/10

Similarly, educational psychologists find that students who don’t know the answer tend to pick the middle options:
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-3984.2003.tb01099.x

The same happens in Battleship, on shelves, dropdown menus:
https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615588092
7/10

One key bias is middle bias - favouring central options and avoiding extremes.
Behavioural scientists have shown that adding an 'ultra‑premium' option to an initial offering of 'premium' and 'basic' makes the premium option (now middle) more popular
https://doi.org/10.1086/208899
6/10

We’re bad at spotting randomness, but also bad at being random. Ideally answers A/B/C should be chosen with equal probability.
Any systematic bias lets sharp listeners like Griffith pick up patterns and beat the 1/3 odds.
5/10

And even in public toilets—middle cubicles can be up to 50% more likely to be chosen than outer ones: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1995.tb00304.x

Was middle bias affecting the producers’ choices? Hard to say—but it's one of many ways randomness surprises us.
8/10

Ever notice that multiple‑choice quizzes often feel strangely predictable? I recently dug into why answers so often sit in the middle—and what this reveals about our deep, systematic difficulty with randomness. It’s more surprising than you might think. 🧵👇
1/10

In light of the Royal Society's continued inaction on Elon Musk, it seems appropriate to share this again.

I wrote it last March when I resigned my position as associate editor at a Royal Society Journal.

Things haven't got better since then.

https://kityates.substack.com/p/why-im-resigning-my-editorship-at

"I'm afraid there's many bad people around, but they have made scientific advances." - President of the Royal Society.

The Royal Society continues to be happy to be associated with, indeed honour Elon Musk with fellowship, despite the Grok scandal.

I will never understand this.

It’s sad to think, but maybe I’ve gone to the US for the last time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo

By the end of January 2020, it should have been clear that the virus posed a "serious and immediate threat" and "urgent planning" should have started, it says. Instead, February 2020 is described as a “lost month” with life continuing almost as normal across the country.
2/3