The "implications" and "connecting the dots" that you're doing is a means of construction a strawman. What you allege Damore tried to imply is not correct.

For your first alleged implication, remember he wrote that Google "lowered the bar by reducing the false negative rate." You're relying on deceptive quotations right off the bat. Regardless, the claim that discriminatory diversity programs that boost female applicants' chances of getting an offer necessarily implies that female candidates who get offers are less qualified is untrue. Say a company introduces a policy that when men pass all the interviews, the company flips a coin and if heads they get an offer and no offer if it's tails. Women just get an offer after passing the interviews. Does this discriminate in favor of women? Absolutely. Does this make the women who got offers less qualified? Only if you consider luck to be a qualification. Lastly, if Googlers were offended by a correct statement about the company's discriminatory hiring practices then they direct their offense to the recruiters or HR people that instituted those discriminatory practices.

Yet again, in the second purported implication you're trying to claim that Damore wrote that female employees are less fit. This is not correct on two points. One, Damore wasn't writing about Google employees or women in tech. He was writing about all women, worldwide. And second, he didn't write that they are less fit to be in high stress roles. He claimed that these thoroughly studied differences in personality make the average woman less likely to want to be in those roles. Again, Damore wrote about preferences - the things that affect the choices that people make - not fitness.

Your last paragraph is difficult to follow and stretches my willingness to assume you're participating in good faith:

> But the implication is still clear as day. Defending yourself behind "but that's not what I said" doesn't work: people are not stupid and can connect the dots, even if they aren't willing to take your reasoning apart in order to show you why they think you're acting in bad faith.

Because you're to connect the dots in a way that does not hold true. Your reasoning behind reaching these "implications" does not hold up to scrutiny. And in doing so, you're stuffing words into another person's mouth.

> The "but it's all statistical, I wasn't talking about female Googlers" isn't a valid defense either

Women that choose to go into technology aren't in the scope of what Damore is talking about. Female Googlers (at least, in engineering which is what Damore was writing about) are part of the section of women that want to go into technology. Damore is not writing about their ability or their preferences. He's writing about why the group of women that want to go into technology is smaller than the group of men that want to go into technology. This does not say anything about the former besides its relative size compared to the latter.

Let me put this in simpler terms: The majority of both men and women don't go into tech. Say 99% of men go into fields other than tech, and 99.75% of women go into fields other than tech. Men and women are nearly identical, almost all of them don't go into tech. Saying that small minority that do is larger among men as compared to women due to innate preferences is an explanation as to why we have 99% vs. 99.75%. It is making no statement, whatsoever, about the capability of the 0.25% of women and 1.0% of men that do go into tech.

> I wasn't talking about female Googlers" isn't a valid defense either: if I were to argue that men are more likely to be rapists than women (statistically true) and therefore companies should abstain from hiring men (or at the very least, quarantine them to be safe and avoid "false negatives") in order to reduce workplace rape, men would rightfully feel insulted and write me off as crazy. "You're more likely to be a rapist" is a lesser insult than "You're a rapist" but it's still one, and hiding behind the adverb "statistically" doesn't change that.

I'm a man, and I am not at all offended by that statement. It's factually correct. Whether or not I a rape a woman is something within my control, so I am not at all offended when people point out that men commit rape orders of magnitude more often than women. Saying "men are more likely to be a rapist" is not at all the same thing as saying "you're more likely to be a rapist" to individual men. In fact, not only am I not offended by such statements I would like to remind those men that do take offense to such a statement that it is factually correct and that we should not take honest assessment of the behavior of men as a whole as personal insults.

And if the men in your social circles really would write you off as crazy then those men have some serious insecurity about discussing sexual assault. It probably means that conversations they should be having, aren't being had. I'm deeply concerned by this last point, because this inability to distinguish between society-wide assessments and statements made directly to one's person effectively makes it impossible to discuss many social issues.