Paywall. Non-paywall link or summary?
Here’s a post by one of the coiners of the term: https://xriskology.substack.com/p/tescreal-faq
We cannot know what Musk actually believes, of course. He claims that longtermism is “a close match for my philosophy,” and has made other statements suggesting he’s a longtermist (see question #3). However, it is possible that tech billionaires like Musk came across longtermism and realized that it provides a superficially plausible moral excuse for what they want to do anyways: colonize space, merge our brains with AI, and so on, while ignoring the plight of the global poor.
Longtermism and the other TESCREAL ideologies naturally appeal to tech billionaires because these ideologies tell them exactly what they want to hear: not only are you excused from caring about “non-existential” risks like global poverty, but you are a morally better person for focusing on space colonization, jumpstarting the next stage of human evolution, etc.
We’ll be that is a new point of view I don’t think I’ve heard of before, or at least not in that level of detail and explanation.
Thank you!
In terms of discussion, I guess it boils down to the ends justifying the means, or all that matters are results.
It also explains much of Musk’s recent behavior. If you can suck up to an idiot and in return get free reign on anything you do, screw whatever supposed values you used to have. I suppose I do wonder where the dividing point was. Why “suck up” to liberals for so many years and then just flip. The “why” is more clearly understood, but what was the inciting incident.
The inciting incident is pretty clearly his daughter coming out as trans.
