SIR – One of the things your correspondents Messrs Bloom, Smith, Bird and Rhodes share is that they have all declared that they are not experts on the subjects of their letters to the T&A in the past month or so.

However, their lack of training, qualifications and expertise does not seem to be a handicap to them in having a deep understanding of complex topics such as climate change, meteor strikes and measuring inflation. Nor does it seem to shake their confidence in their conclusions, usually that the experts are wrong.

In contrast, the trained, qualified and experienced experts know that they can never be right. The only question is how wrong they are. They spend their careers trying to understand the sources of error and improve their conclusions.

Prof Philip Tetlock has shown that people who were conscious that their judgements could be wrong made better forecasts than people who were confident in theirs.

In passing, does the recent spate of letters from Messrs Bloom and Smith have anything to do with the forthcoming elections?

Ron Harding, Beck Houses, Bingley