That's a completely irrelevant hypothetical, because the "apex fallacy" (which I shall continue to put in quotes due to the fact that it's not an actual fallacy) is a rhetorical argument set against data driven conclusions. It is literal nonsense. I'm racking my brain, and the only good analogy I can come up with is if I said, "Man Texas is hot." And you replied, "NO, that's the 'apex fallacy'. Only its really hot days are hot, and sometimes it's hotter in Minnesota." If you can find a better one, I'd like to hear it. Or, if there were some actual scholarship on the matter, then yes, I would take it a lot more seriously, even if I disagreed I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. Fortunately, we don't have to resort to that here. I'm not sure I get the sports analogy, unless we're relating one's business and administrative acumen to their physicality. On the subject of chess, it might just be a numbers game. That's what Yasser Seirawan suggests in this book, although it is speculation. He estimates the numbers of males and females who play chess and based on the huge number of men compared to women who play, estimates that the odds are against women for having a world class player (if we assume random chance). I'm not going to defend or rebuke that claim, because I have no idea; just putting it out there, because it's the only thing I've ever read about it. The same can't be said of women in the business world, because they occupy a proportionate number of low and middle jobs, but lack representation at the top.If you learned that the article was in error, and the concept was actually introduced by some respectable source, would that change your opinion of it?
I gave an example similar to this: "Man, it must be nice to live in Dubai! People are so rich they abandon luxury cars all over the place!" "You dunce, that's the apex fallacy. Lots of people in Dubai are poor immigrant laborers working in awful conditions." It's a kind of fallacy of composition, and it's debatable if it happens often enough that we need a special name for it. With the sports question, I am wondering about male/female differences generally. It seems obvious that men have natural advantages in power lifting, but it is much harder to tell if they have natural advantages at power lunches. Clearly women face social obstacles unrelated to their natural ability in the workplace. It's very hard to tease these factors apart. It's possible that fewer women are recognized for chess skill, and are less encouraged to perform, and discouraged by tradition. I don't know if that is enough to explain male dominance in chess. It is cool that the strongest female player never competed for the Women's World Championship: "I always say that women should have the self-confidence that they are as good as male players, but only if they are willing to work and take it seriously as much as male players." Perhaps we will see greater participation by women. I like the awkward dialog in Cryptonomicon, starting where the word "geek" appears. The highlight: "Whereas women can’t?" "I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I’m characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier." And here is an abandoned Ferrari Enzo."If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else."
I'll just leave this here. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differentlyScientists have drawn on nearly 1,000 brain scans to confirm what many had surely concluded long ago: that stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains.