It's not the tweets, it's the retweets. People's tweets on Twitter are usually not that bad. Their retweets, and, for slightly crazier people, their quote tweets are what contain the bizarre mischaracterizations, because they're the pulls from the top of the attention-seeking crab bucket. 

I run a company that sells security software to large enterprises. I remember seeing this (since deleted) post Eliezer retweeted last year during the Crowdstrike blue screen incident, and thinking: "Am I crazy? What on earth is this guy talking about?"

The audit requirements Mark is talking about don't exist. He just completely made them up. ChatGPT's explanation here is correct; even if you're selling to the federal government^[1], there's no "fast track" for big names like Crowdstrike. At absolute maximum your auditor is going to ask for evidence that you use some IDS solution, and you'll have to gather the same evidence no matter what solution you're using. 

Now, Yudkowsky is not a mendacious person, and he isn't going to pump misinfo into the ether himself. But naturally if anybody goes on Twitter long enough they're gonna see stuff like this, and it will just feel plausible to you. It will pass whatever cogsec antimalware blacklists & heuristics you've developed for assessing the credibility of things on the internet.

Probably because, like, if you overheard this kind of thing at a party, it would be credible! It's only on this platform, where people are literally stepping over one another to concoct absurd lies for attention, where people are additionally incentivized to present as having personal expertise in the lie to go slightly more viral, and then an algorithm is selectively boosting the people that do that well enough and effectively enough to the top of your feed, that you encounter this nonsense. And then it goes into your world model, and the next time you see someone claim some crazy thing about how the food industry is in cahoots with Big Chicken you're more likely to believe it, etc. etc.

1. ^{^}

   And the vast majority of software companies, to be clear, don't have to do anything like FedRAMP. The largest and most ubiquitous compliance frameworks, like SOC2 or ISO 27001, are self-imposed standards maintained by nonprofits like the AICPA and have nothing to do with the government.

This framing underplays the degree to which the site is designed to produce misleading propaganda. The primary content creators are people who literally do that as a full time job.

Like, I'll show you a common pattern of how it happens. It's an extremely unfortunate example because a person involved has just died, but it's the first one I found, and I feel like it's representative of how political discourse happens on the platform:

First I'll explain what's actually misleading about this so I can make my broader point. The quote tweeted account, "Right Angle News Network", reports that "The official black lives matter account has posted a video stating that black people 'have a right to violence' amid... the slaying of Iryna Zarutska". The tweet is designed so that, while technically correct, it appears to be saying the video is about Iryna's murder. But actually:

• The video the account posted is taken from a movie made forty years ago.
• The account doesn't reference the murder at all. The only connection that the post has to the murder is that it was made a few days after it happened, which I guess means that it was posted "amid" the murder.

As is typical, the agitator's tweet (which was carefully designed not to be an explicit lie), is then "quote tweeted" and rephrased by a larger account, who attempts to package the message for more virality. In this case the person just says "Official Black Lives Matter account justifying the murder of Iryna Zarutska". But that's not actually established at all! The quote tweeter is just reading a certainty into a tweet that was deliberately engineered to be misread.  

This pattern happens everywhere, for every socially charged topic, on every side. "Your enemies are saying X horrible shit" is possibly the most common form of slander on Twitter. It happens especially often when people are posting about stuff that happens on other platforms, because there it's extremely easy to lack context or mislead people about what's going on.

Only inasmuch he's a proof-by-example. By that I mean he's one of the most earnest/truthseeking users I found when I was still using the platform, and yet he still manages to retweet things outside his domain of expertise that are either extraordinarily misleading or literally, factually incorrect - and I think if you sat him down and prompted him to think about the individual cases he would probably notice why, he just doesn't because the platform isn't conducive to that kind of deliberate thought.

I don't think it's possible for mere mortals to use Twitter for news about politics or current events and not go a little crazy. At least, I have yet to find a Twitter user who regularly or irregularly talks about these things, and fails to boost obvious misinformation every once in a while. It doesn't matter what IQ they have or how rational they were in 2005; Twitter is just too chock full of lies, mischaracterizations, telephone games, and endless, endless, endless malicious selection effects, which by the time you're done using it are designed to appeal to whichever reader in particular you are. It's just impossible to use the site as people normally do and also practice the necessary skepticism about each individual post one is reading.

More generally, leftists profess many values which are upheld the most by western civilization (e.g. support for sexual freedom, women's rights, anti-racism, etc). But then in conflicts they often side specifically against western civilization. This seems like a straightforward example of pessimization.

Not at all. The trend is that in any given context, American leftists tend to support the 'weaker' group against the stronger group, regardless of the merits of the individual cases.  They have a world model that says that that most social problems come from "big" people hurting "little" people, and believe the focus of their politics should be remedying this. In the case of Israel-Palestine, Israel and the United States are much more militarily and economically powerful than Gaza, so ceteris paribus^[1] they side with Gaza, just as they side with women, ethnic minorities, the poor, etc. You may disagree with this behavior but it's fairly consistent.

By contrast, the argument that Israel is a bastion of western values and therefore leftists should support its war against a smaller neighbor is kind of abstract. The immediate outcome of Israel winning the war is just that Israel gets stronger, not that women in Gaza become more free. There's also a thing there about Gazans being brown and Israelis not, etc...

None of this has anything to do with liberals pessimizing their own values, and it feels like you must have a blind spot somewhere if you're reaching for that explanation when there's a much simpler and more obvious one readily available. 

1. ^{^}

    Liberals' protests in support of Palestine are additionally amplified as a result of a media diet that drip feeds them an artificially strong amount of Israeli war crimes, instead of western liberal hysteria.

I seriously doubt Richard recommends any of the regimes/interventions you actually argue against here. 

This class gains status by signaling commitment to luxury beliefs. Since more absurd beliefs are more costly-to-fake signals, the resulting ideology is actively perverse (i.e. supports whatever is least aligned with their stated core values, like Hamas).

Without commenting on your broader point, I think you believe elites support Hamas because the conservative Twitter feed is presenting you/your circle tailored ragebait, not because elites invert their own utility functions. 

I mean, my normal spread looks like this:

Two considerations (of many) in choosing an outfit to impress:

• How good/impressive your audience think it looks, aesthetically.
• How good/impressive your audience will expect others think it looks.

Not a fashion expert, but I expect magazines like Vogue serve a social purpose in helping shape #2, just as much if not more than they shape #1 directly.

The other commenters appear to disagree in principle.