False premises, false promises: selected writings of Petr Skrabanek.

The False Premises and Promises of Bitcoin

Designed to compete with fiat currencies, bitcoin proposes it is a crypto-currency alternative. Bitcoin makes a number of false claims, including: bitcoin can be a reserve currency for banking; hoarding equals saving; and that we should believe bitcoin can expand by deflation to become a global transactional currency supply. Bitcoin’s developers combine technical implementation proficiency with...

Commentary: false premises, false promises and false positives--the case against mammographic screening for breast cancer.

I start it is important that I establish my credibility as my somewhat eccentric career allows me an unusual insight into the problem. First of all I come from a family with a bad history of breast cancer, which in part fuelled my zeal for entering this sub-specialty. Next I am a surgeon who has been at the front line of breast cancer treatment for over 30 years and during the latter half of th...

True premises , false conclusion , yet valid

Here are two widely accepted assumptions about truth-conditional semantics for natural language: 1. It is truth-preserving. That is to say, if a NL semantic framework assigns the value 'true', relative to a given parameter of context c, to sentences S1,..., Sn, and if sentence S is a logical consequence of the set {S1,...,Sn}, then, relative to the same c, the framework should also assign the v...

Basing drug scheduling decisions on scientific ranking of harmfulness: false promise from false premises.

In recent years a number of studies have attempted to rank drugs by a single measure of harmfulness as the basis for decisions about scheduling and classification. These efforts are fundamentally flawed, both conceptually and methodologically. The effort to provide a single measure masks the variety of non-comparable dimensions that are relevant, the fact that benefits are ignored for most, but...

Some False Premises of Max Weber's Sociology of Law