No one extrapolates from Anne and Bob to Claire and David. They observe that men are faster than women, and observe that this is especially true for outliers. Likewise, no one extrapolates from elite-level bodybuilders or powerlifters or Olympic lifters that weight training doesn’t build muscle mass. They observe that it does build muscle mass, and observe that when there is no reason to reduce fat levels, fat levels are also higher.
I don’t think it is flawed to observe that, in virtually every sport in which the rules are the same for men as for women, the men win overwhelmingly, and to conclude that at every other level, men still win most of the time. 100% of the time? No. That doesn’t invalidate the conclusion that men are better at most sports than women on a head-to-head basis.
Okay, I’ll bet away. $10 says that #1 wasn’t said on this board. You game?
If anyone has said that, I don’t think it fits the fallacy as you described it, as it’s not extrapolating what actually happens to a professional weightlifter/bodybuilder (actual results seems to be what you’re going for- see the first two sentences in the second to last paragraph in the OP). But what if weight-training did directly cause chubbiness? Would it then be a fallacy?
If one wanted to change the way he looks, and did not want to look muscular at all, would he be wrong to look at the way professional bodybuilders look and decide training with weights isn’t a good idea? Of course not.
He would be wrong if he thought training with weights would make him look like a professional in a short amount of time, and that lots of time training correctly, genetics, drugs and non-standard eating habits aren’t what got the pros there, but I haven’t experienced people being that naive. However, it wouldn’t be fallacious to think one would at least get closer to looking like a pro bodybuilder by doing what they do. If it was the case that weight training directly caused pros to become chubby, then it wouldn’t be fallacious to believe that some amount of weight training would cause at least some increase in fat.
Why shouldn’t I be skeptical that it’s a common fallacy? I don’t see it happening and you haven’t posted cites of real-life examples. The examples you have posted don’t sound like any claims I’ve ever heard. I have been participating in and reading about bodybuilding and variations of weightlifting (two different things, btw) for over 35 years. I have never heard anyone make the claim you say was made on this board. if one person did say it, it’s certainly not common.
IME, women in particular, can be fearful of training with weights because they don’t want to be muscle-bound, but I don’t think it’s from extrapolating from pros. They see average gym bros looking muscular-ish and they don’t want to look like that. It’s a misconception by some women (not most) brought on by fear, but I don’t think this either fits the fallacy here. It’s more a misunderstanding of not understanding the limitations of muscle growth in women as compared to men.
Maybe better than the example than those in your OP is women looking at professional women bodybuilders and thinking that going to the gym will make them look like that. It’s probably mostly due to ignorance of how much PEDs have to do with looking like that, but I suppose it somewhat fits the fallacy.
That’s not what that thread is about. It’s about a TV trope. It’s regarding works of fiction and whether or not the writer(s) almost always having the girl beat the boy is a good idea. The boy, IME, is almost always shown to be the obvious winner (in the OP’s example he’s much taller, in a sport where height makes a big difference) yet the girl will of course win. The point of mentioning that the top women tennis players in the world don’t beat a low ranking male player in real life is to stress how unlikely it is for girls to beat boys who are apparently skilled in the sport or have an advantage, and that they almost always do in fictional works. There’s no fallacy there.
That’s not how the trope work, though. If anything, it’s at least slightly the opposite.
I don’t know if the claim is false, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether or not the claim is due to the fallacy you are claiming. It could be due to evidence the claimant is aware of, regardless if the evidence is being interpreted correctly or not. I said that the two statements can be being made independently of one another. I don’t know as you haven’t cited anything.
I didn’t make any claims at all about the reality of when or how much one can improve at chess, but did you miss this part?:
“(assuming the person making the claim was speaking of players that took up the game much earlier than 30)”
I don’t hear people making claims like “There’s no way you can run further than that guy; he’s from East Africa!” Sure, lots of people think they have a genetic advantage (and from what I recall there’s some evidence of that) and it’s at least one reason they have a disproportionate amount of top marathon runners, but I don’t think there’s a fallacy due to extrapolation from professional athletes here; it’s about genetic advantages and the value placed on them.
There ya go. That’s about as far as people take it, IME. In your OP you said the common belief is “a woman is very unlikely to beat a man at tennis” and I don’t know how much stress people put on that “very.”
Except they do, and I began with four examples. Is this thread really going to be about me proving that it happens?
I put this thread in IMHO for a reason – that I wanted to discuss the phenomenon itself, but fine, I’ll go find the actual links.
Do you think I’m saying “Hey, guess what guys? Turns out women are physically stronger than men after all! Who’d have thought?”
If so, please read again.
Maybe I’m wrong but I do feel I understand the argument you are making, I just don’t think it is common. Are there really people claiming that all men are better athletes than all women? If you overlayed the bell curve distribution of athletics of men over women, the distribution of men would be further to the right than women. So maybe a woman in the 90th percentile of sport X was equal to a man in the 75th percentile. But again, that woman is still better than 75% of men. The top female tennis player can still beat all but about 300 men at tennis.
Women are on average more educated than men, it doesn’t mean if you sample 1000 men and 1000 women that all the women will have more education than all the men. I don’t think most people would support that kind of logical fallacy.
No, I think you are saying that people think men always beat women in sports because elite male athletes always or nearly always beat women in sports. Or that weight training doesn’t build muscle mass because superheavyweight lifters have high fat levels, along with very high levels of muscle mass.
I don’t think people are drawing those conclusions for those reasons. What they are concluding is, in general, men beat women in sports, nearly always at the elite level and usually at every other level, and weight training builds muscle mass, although superheavyweight lifters have high fat levels as well.
The thread about women beating men in movies, and is implied to be implausible because ofthe Williams sisters’ game against a professional mens team. (But note in most instances like this in movies, we’re not talking about professionals, or even adults usually).
I’m still looking for the chess.com one…their forum search tools suck.
And the fourth one was verbal, not from a forum.
I don’t think so, not because of that game. I doubt the OP of that thread questioned whether or not it’s a good idea for that trope to continue and made statements like this:
" But as strongly as I support my daughter in tennis, I know she’d get creamed if she took on anyone on the boy’s team, and I don’t think it does her any favors to pretend otherwise."
because of that game. Surely it’s based on a lifetime of experience and practical knowledge regarding boys generally being better at sports than girls. The fact that you think so shows how much you’re reading into things to support your idea of the commonality of a fallacy you’re proposing.
What kinds of Par 5s are you playing that you need two fairway woods? Or was that a typo? Most Par 5s I see are in the 470-570 yard range, so 250 yard shot plus 200 or so with a wood that would leave you 100 or so yards away.
But your point stands, don’t follow the pros and what they try and do.
As a professional chess coach and ELO-rated player, I can comment on 3.
Computers are by far the main change nowadays in learning chess to a high level. There are literally billions of games neatly organised by opening or player to study.
Grandmasters qualify younger these days because of this, and being younger helps keep you there (because of the relentless study needed.)
The current listing of the World’s top players gives (sorted by age):
The shred of validity to your argument IMO is this: the more precisely we state the competitive level of the man and woman in a head to head match up in an athletic contest, the less random element there is as to that variable. Jane turns out to be a professional athlete in that sport, Joe turns out to be an average schlub. As opposed to nailing it down in advance that both are professionals or both are active amateurs, both never play sports, etc.
I’m just not convinced that that very obvious factor confuses many people and so constitutes any kind of common fallacy. Who actually believes it doesn’t make a difference if it’s me (never played tennis since being frustrated by it as a kid) against young women who actively participate in college intramural tennis, say, or college men’s v college women’s who compete intramural? I think it’s understood by most people that the implicit comparison is of men and women of a generally similar competitive level for their sex: and if that’s even roughly true, men are better.
Re: the potentially most touchy comparison, 4, I think debates about race and genetics have created a tendency to deliberately misunderstand and misstate statistical arguments about abilities by group. It’s common IME for the hypothesis that the distributions of various abilities by race might be not insignificantly different to be deliberately misconstrued as a claim the distributions don’t overlap. Deliberate or not your point has a similar flavor to my reading. Who exactly are the hypothetical people who’d be surprised that the longest men’s time in an open long distance race that attracts casual amateurs of all ages and serious competitors in their prime, would be way longer than the best women’s?
And didn’t Lasker finish 2nd in a tournament when he was in his 60s?
Anyway, thanks for the research, but to be clear: yes of course the statement is true about the professional game. I’m saying that people often extrapolate out from the professional game to statements about players in general. If you’re not a professional you can basically improve throughout your life with practice and study (though you will eventually get diminishing returns).
Correct.
And as for the “shred of validity” actually the responses in this thread make me realize that this was indeed a useful observation.
Because I gave examples of obviously incorrect extrapolations, and the responses, apart from those simply accusing me of lying, have been essentially “But men are stronger than women on average!” – failing to acknowledge the flawed reasoning between obviously true statements like that and the extrapolated claims.
I disagree.
The four examples here were just off the top of my head, not the only times I’ve heard this kind of statement.
I think once you notice it, it’s very common. Like I say, even this thread is somewhat evidence of it, as some of the responses seem to be defending the statements on the basis of observations about professionals.
I don’t agree that there’s any fallacious tendency to ‘extrapolate from professionals’. As I said, the only valid point I believe you make is to note that if we don’t specify the relative (within their sex) competitive level of the opponents, then that’s a variable which doesn’t exist if we do specify. But it’s obvious. I think it’s very rare that anyone would be surprised by a randomly selected woman defeating a randomly selected man in a sports contest where it later turned out the woman was a high level competitor (great high school or college player, who found it not quite worth trying it as a pro) and the man average among men. But for a given relative level within sex, men are considerably better at most sports and that will play out on average even with random selection.
Whereas your claim that the difference between men and women is particularly exaggerated at high competitive levels is just an assertion you haven’t backed. Again, if you nail down the relative competitive level of the man among men and the woman among women, I don’t believe the difference is necessarily that highly variable across the spectrum of competitive level, or anyway that’s something for you to show, I believe, to establish the ‘extrapolation from professionals’ idea rather than just keep asserting it. AFAIK the difference wouldn’t necessarily be a lot less if you knew the man and woman were both excellent school players who couldn’t quite go pro than it would be for top pro’s, or only be more variable at that level due to less documentation of the exact competitive level compared to pro rankings. The difference would only necessarily be a lot narrower, by common sense, where both players were so completely lacking in skill and experience as to not be able to effectively bring their basic abilities (strength, speed) to bear at all.
Let me stop you there.
In this thread I’m saying IME this is a common fallacy. And your response is, paraphrasing, “Well IME it’s not common, so your point is invalid”. Why does your experience trump mine?
Huh? I thought that this is something you just agreed to in your previous post.
What are you saying now, that you disagree with the Anne-Bob, Claire-David example? If not, what?
I have given several examples.
I didn’t have to; this is IMHO, I just gave some illustrative examples, but nevertheless you cannot say that the phenomenon doesn’t exist, only that you think it is uncommon in your experience.
