I often hear or read statements that seem to have a similar type of fallacious reasoning about it. I want to know if there is a name this type of fallacy:
- Top women chess players have a lower draw rate than top men chess players, therefore women players are more aggressive.
This is a fallacy, because if you compare top women chess players with similarly ranked men chess players then their draw rate is the same, meaning that the "aggression" aspect has less to do with gender and more with level of play.
A different example:
- Top C++ programmers earn more than top Java developers, therefore C++ programmers are smarter.
This seems like a similar fallacy, because if you compare Java and C++ programmers in the same application domain, then their earnings are similar.
Clearly this is a type of false equivocation, because we are dealing with comparing apples and oranges. However, this seems different from the more traditional case where you use syntactically similar but semantically different concepts (as in the theory of evolution is only a theory) - in this case the root of the fallacy is that the context within which the concepts are similar is not the context within which the argument is being presented.