In Wikipedia — reading about Roko's basilisk causing "nervous breakdowns" ...

I've spoken over PM with the person I believe Roko was talking about when he said "one person at SIAI was severely worried by this, to the point of having terrible nightmares". They say:

I'm the person Roko was referring to in his original post. I saw this thread talking about "nervous breakdowns" and wanted to post a basic clarification to make sure this isn't because people are reading something into that line that's more sensational than the reality. There have been times when I was anxious about possibilities in the space of TDT, acausal blackmail, and simulationism, not "the Basilisk" particularly, but that general sort of thing. This happened both when I was a visiting fellow at SIAI in 2009-10 and earlier. None of this amounted to anything I'd consider a "nervous breakdown". Nobody observing my behavior or internet posting, say, would have noticed much out of the ordinary. These anxieties have faded over time and haven't been an issue for the last decade or so.

I think the claim is false, though it's hard to prove an absence. I have never heard of anyone having a particularly strong emotional reaction to Roko's basilisk (outside of a "sneering" reaction towards rationalists or something), and almost everyone I've met in the community thinks the thought experiment is not particularly interesting or important or dangerous. I do like the general policy of not talking a ton about infohazards of this type, but that's just a broad reference class, of which Roko's basilisk seems like a non-central example.

The Roko's Basilisk [? · GW] wiki article has a lot of detail, and I recommend looking through it. It also includes these paragraphs: 

Other sources have repeated the claim that Less Wrong users think Roko's basilisk is a serious concern. However, none of these sources have yet cited supporting evidence on this point, aside from Less Wrong moderation activity itself. (The ban, of course, didn't make it easy to collect good information.)

Less Wrong user Gwern reports that "Only a few LWers seem to take the basilisk very seriously," adding, "It's funny how everyone seems to know all about who is affected by the Basilisk and how exactly, when they don't know any such people and they're talking to counterexamples to their confident claims."

... if THE CLAIM is true then it brings to mind some potentially unkind questions about the psychological heath of a seemingly significant portion of the 'rationality community'.

So I think we have much stronger evidence of psychological health issues with the rationality community (which I assume is the same thing as the 'rationality community' though I'm uncertain) via things like the LW and SSC surveys. Perhaps you do not trust surveys because of self-report issues? But in that case I'd probably look at proxies like common correlates of mental health issues, or maybe suicide rates within the community and see if it's above baseline. 

I'm personally pretty convinced that psychological issues in the rationalist community is substantially above baseline[1], but I would not want to trust a fairly complex causal assignment ascribed to a specific cause, that likely has politically motivated reporting, above more mundane instruments like surveys and other observational data. 

[1] The main source of hesitation for me is uncertainty about the baseline; it's plausible but unlikely to me that "normal people" are very crazy in the clinical sense but for some reason this is mostly unreported. 

There's no way to give a citation to Eliezer not saying it. You might get further querying the citations in the article for the claim that he did say it. There are three, but the first does not mention it and the third calls it a rumour. The second quotes a chunk of Eliezer's immediate response to Roko, the one that began "Listen to me very closely, you idiot" (which I remember reading at the time), and then says "Yudkowsky said that Roko had already given nightmares to several LessWrong users and had brought them to the point of breakdown." My memory is not detailed enough to say whether he said that, but I think it quite likely that someone did say something of the sort back then.

If you search LessWrong for "Listen to me very closely, you idiot", there is a hit on that comment by Eliezer, but the comment itself has been deleted. Since there is that hit, the comment is presumably still in the database. Perhaps the LessWrong admins might be willing to give you sight of it? But the result either way wouldn't be a citable source for Wikipedia.

The argument for which EY banned the basilisk is a very complex argument and you need to understand TDT to follow it. Newspapers are in the business of dumbing things down for their readers so that their readers get the sense they understand what goes on. As a result you won't find a good explanation of why EY banned it in any newspaper. As a result you won't find a good explanation in anything that's seen as worthy to be a Wikipedia source.

To my knowledge this claim seems to be almost entirely fabricated as the only text that is vaguely reminiscent of this claim in the original thread is a claim from Roko that “One might think that the possibility of CEV punishing people couldn’t possibly be taken seriously enough by anyone to actually motivate them. But in fact one person at SIAI was severely worried by this, to the point of having terrible nightmares, though ve wishes to remain anonymous.” which along with describing the experience of a grand total of one person only refers to anxiety resulting from an idea related to the premises of the thought experiment and not the thought experiment itself.

The "Berkeley, CA based Rationalist Community Forum" sent you to this a few times [LW · GW]. In which EY stated that the infohazard itself, not "emotional brittleness" was the cause. This included a direct statement from EY, whereas the links and sources that suggested "emotional brittleness" were sourced as "rumors."

Be careful of DDCT!

Given the latest post [LW · GW] about not just Leverage but also CFAR and MIRI, the Wikipedia article now seems to me sufficiently accurate as it stands.