[FeepingCreature]

As we can see with the Sam Altman debacle, a silent deletion would probably only have fanned the flames more.

When the Basilisk came out, everybody said it was a cognitohazard and I should avoid seeking out information about it. This made me incredibly motivated to find out everything about it. Silence doesn't work.

[HaZeust]

Silence works when already almost no one knows about it. It's why I can delete a HackerNews comment that I regret posting 10 minutes after the fact, and expect to face no pragmatic repercussions - the impression was already low. Sam Altman was already bound to be a PR nightmare as an oust of control for the CEO of the biggest-growing company in history, a covert operation to keep it from the collective conscious would not have worked. There's levels to this approach.

Roko's Basilisk, a post on a public forum that only a few dozen people saw before Eliezer commented on it, could've gotten away with it. It's a shame it didn't try.