Generally as a matter of rhetoric one does not pick out a single attribute to predicate of a class of people, unless one wishes to imply that other classes do not possess the attribute, or that the attribute is a sufficient condition for membership in the class.
What makes it a dirty rhetorical trick is, of course, that one can then reply to one's critics "ah, but I didn't explicitly say what you read into that".
Draw a 2x2 matrix of people who "got rich" (i.e. experienced significant rise in wealth) and are "fairly driven". This will give you four groups:
1) Got rich and weren't driven.
2) Got rich and were driven.
3) Stayed poor and weren't driven.
4) Stayed poor but were driven.
pg statement says he's been exposed with group 2, which he highlighted. You seem to accuse him of implicitly highlighting group 3, and would prefer he implicitly (explicitly?) highlights group 4.
Is that the gist of the argument?
The statements "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven." and "Most people who are fairly driven tend to get rich." are not logically equivalent.
Commenters stating that the essay blames poverty on the poor really are reading something into the essay that wasn't there (at least for me). The topic of economic desparity has become such a hot and emotional one that it seems impossible to have an honest conversation about what it really looks like, what are the causes and effects, etc. It seems very important to me that we drop the tribalism and fighting so that we can have an honest /argument/ about this topic.
There really is severe suffering at the bottom of the economic scale here (SV/peninsula), and in my opinion it is the shared responsibility of those of us who have lots of options to figure out how we can help to relieve some of the suffering. However, I don't thing that needs to be the singular focus of every single discussion of economic inequlity, and I don't think it's productive to pan this essay for not really addressing that.
>Commenters stating that the essay blames poverty on the poor really are reading something into the essay that wasn't there (at least for me).
He did call those who disagree with Zuckerberg's letter envious losers, so how can you read something like the Inequality essay without that colouring it?
I skimmed the linked article and searched it for "envious losers" but didn't find the phrase you mention. It did have a nasty tone, and seemed more like a personal attack and attempt to incite anger than a reasoned response to the ideas presented.
The article presents, as an image (presumably for archiving purposes in case the tweet is deleted), a tweet from pg saying, and I quote:
@sama I think the reason you're surprised is that not being a loser yourself you underestimate the power of envy.
(in response to a tweet saying "It takes a lot for the internet to surprise me, but the general reaction to Zuck's letter did it")
As to the rest of your comment... I think you're reading something which takes an aggressive tone in promoting its argument, and mistaking that for a personal attack. There is quite a strong critique of the "startups create value" idea, beginning with the observation that they don't, really -- VCs confer value and legitimacy upon certain startups, and not on others. Which means that in a startup-based economy, such as the one pg argues for, pg and his friends would wield an enormous amount of power. In a true startup-based economy, VCs would literally be the central planners, signing off on which businesses can and can't be started (I mean, in theory someone in such an economy might privately have access to enough capital to get going without VCs, but the deck would still be heavily stacked against those people, and there aren't exactly a lot of them). And it is entirely fair game to question the motives of someone who has such a strong incentive to favor a true startup-based economy, which of course the essay does.
What makes it a dirty rhetorical trick is, of course, that one can then reply to one's critics "ah, but I didn't explicitly say what you read into that".