Paul Taylor

The excellent service you provide in pointing out your correspondents’ errors slipped up last week when you allowed Roger Pebody (Letters, 7 September) to write that since gay men are more readily found in London than Northumberland, geographically random sampling was inappropriate to measure the frequency of homosexuality. It is precisely because researchers are alert to systematic biases that they...

John Allen Paulos (LRB, 11 March), explains how psychologists can devise situations which lead unsuspecting subjects to make supposedly irrational choices. This must be entertaining for lovers of practical jokes, but it is not clear what it reveals about human rationality. We are told that, when asked whether ‘r’ occurs more often as the first or the third letter of a word, people answer on the...