<edit: Ben deleted the tweets, so it doesn't feel right to keep them up after that. The rest of the text is unchanged for now, but I might edit this later. If you want to read a longer, thoughtful take from Ben about EA post-FTX, then you can find one here>
This makes me feel bad, and I'm going to try and articulate why. (This is mainly about my gut reaction to seeing/reading these tweets, but I'll ping @Benjamin_Todd because I think subtweeting/vagueposting is bad practice and I don't want to be hypocritical.) I look forward to Ben elucidating his thoughts if he does so and will reflect and respond in greater detail then.
* At a gut-level, this feels like an influential member of the EA community deciding to 'defect' and leave when the going gets tough. It's like deciding to 'walk away from Omelas' when you had a role in the leadership of the city and benefitted from that position. In contrast, I think the right call is to stay and fight for EA ideas in the 'Third Wave' of EA.
* Furthermore,if you do think that EA is about ideas, then I don't think dissassociating from the name of EA without changing your other actions is going to convince anyone about what you're doing by 'getting distance' from EA. Ben is a GWWC pledger, 80k founder, and is focusing his career on (existential?) threats from advanced AI. To do this and then deny being an EA feels disingenuous for ~most plausible definitions of EA to me.
* Similar considerations to the above make me very pessimisitic about the 'just take the good parts and people from EA, rebrand the name, disavow the old name, continue operating as per usual' strategy to work at all
* I also think that actions/statements like this make it more likely for the whole package of the EA ideas/community/brand/movement to slip into a negative spiral which ends up wasting its potential, and given my points above such a collapse would also seriously harm any attempt to get a 'totally not EA yeah we're definitely not those guys' m