Well, it's evidence that there is some difference between men and women that exists throughout all societies. I think the main epistemic problem is that the explanatory power of the null hypothesis (men and women are natively psychologically almost identical, but people know that women get pregnant and men don't and social structures take this into account) is pretty high and, even worse, often gives reasoning that's isomorphic to ev psychic explanations.
This isn't exclusively a problem for gender, either - oftentimes ev psychic explanations in other domains tend to give explanations that are isomorphic to how one would explain the behavior of a minimally modular rational actor.
Of course if Eliezer is correct - and as best I can tell his reasoning is sound, although the conclusions, even when transported to much less mindkilly domains, seem to be absurd - then this isn't much of a problem at all.
I think the main epistemic problem is that the explanatory power of the null hypothesis (men and women are natively psychologically almost identical, but people know that women get pregnant and men don't and social structures take this into account) is pretty high and, even worse, often gives reasoning that's isomorphic to ev psychic explanations.
So your null hypothesis is that genetic evolution failed to produce any traits in humans that accommodate this fact, so all behavioral differences are the result of memetic evolution and explicit reasoning. This hypothesis strikes me as extremely unlikely.
Today's post, Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych was originally published on 04 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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