You left out the best part:

“Nishin,” you say. “Nobody is accepting your romantic overtures because of Twitter. Nobody is granting you power. Nobody is offering you mon(ey)."

Even if this rumor isn't true, it is strikingly plausible and worrying

Obviously the training data of LLMs contains more than human dialogue, so the claim that the pretrained LLMs are "strictly imitating humans" is clearly false. I don't know why this was never brought up.

The background of the Stanislav Petrov incident is literally one of the dumbest and most insane things I have ever read (attached screenshot below):

The purpose of these audits is not generally to verify with certainty that you're doing everything you say. That would be very hard, maybe impossible. Mostly you fill out a form saying you're doing X. If it turns out later after a breach you weren't doing the stuff you claimed to do during the audit, you're sued.

We're doing a PoC right now for a company with >400,000 employees. I am not their security team, and we haven't sold yet, but on our end everything we've run into is normal procurement BS. The main thing that happens as you start to sell to larger customers is that you have to fill out a lot of forms saying your product does not use slave labor and such.

There is no such thing as directionally correct. The tweet says "If you use Crowdstrike, your auditor checks a single line and moves on. If you use anything else, your auditor opens up an expensive new Chapter of his book." This is literally and unambiguously false. No security/compliance standard - public or private - requires additional labor or verification procedures for non-Crowdstrike EDR alternatives. The steps to pass an audit are the same no matter what solution you're using for EDR. Further, as a vendor, there is a very low ceiling for supporting most of the evidence collection required for any of the standards you cite, even at large scale. Allowing your users to collect such evidence (often, just screenshotting a stats page) is not nearly the largest barrier to entry for new incumbents in Crowdstrike's space.

Further, the larger implication of the above tweet is that companies use Crowdstrike because of regulatory failure, and this is also simply untrue. There are lots of reasons people sort of unthinkingly go with the name brand option in security, but that's a normal enterprise software thing and not anything specific to compliance.

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.