I really didn't expect that. As I see it, a post that multiple people took as being in support of terrorism and somebody quit over is definitely sensational enough to generate a buzz. Surely, you have seen reporters take things out of context. Eliezer has already been targeted for a hatchet job by one reporter.

There was once an occasion where a reporter wrote about me, and did a hatchet job. It was my first time being reported on, and I was completely blindsided by it. I'd known that reporters sometimes wrote hatchet jobs, but I'd thought that it would require malice—I hadn't begun to imagine that someone might write a hatchet job just because it was a cliche, an easy way to generate a few column inches. So I drew upon my own powers of narration, and wrote an autobiographical story on what it felt like to be reported on for the first time—that horrible feeling of violation. I've never sent that story off anywhere, though it's a fine and short piece of writing as I judge it.

For it occurred to me, while I was writing, that journalism is an example of unchecked power—the reporter gets to present only one side of the story, any way they like, and there's nothing that the reported-on can do about it. (If you've never been reported on, then take it from me, that's how it is.) And here I was writing my own story, potentially for publication as traditional journalism, not in an academic forum. I remember realizing that the standards were tremendously lower than in science. That you could get away with damn near anything, so long as it made a good story—that this was the standard in journalism. (If you, having never been reported on yourself, don't believe me that this is the case, then you're as naive as I once was.)

RationalWiki sometimes takes stuff out of context. For instance, the Eliezer facts thread has a "fact" where an LWer edited a picture of him speaking beside a diagram that shows a hierarchy of increasingly more intelligent entities including animals, Einstein and God. The LW'er added Eliezer to the diagram, at a level well beyond God. You can see below this that Eliezer had to add a note for RationalWiki because they had apparently made the mistake of taking this photoshopped diagram out of context.

If some idiot who happens to have a RationalWiki account dropped by or a reporter who was hard up for a scoop discovered this, do you think it isn't likely for them to take it out of context either to make it more sensational or because of mindkill? I, for one, do not think there was anything special about the original post that would prevent it from becoming the subject of a hatchet job.

People act crazy when they're worried about being attacked. I have a friend who has dual citizenship. He came to visit (America) and was harassed at the airport simply because he lives in a different country and the security guard was paranoid about terrorism. I don't see this post getting LW shut down by the government or anything, but it could result in something really disappointing like Eliezer being harassed at airports, or something bad in between.

Considering all this, do you still think the risk of bad publicity is insignificant?