I've had people come to me who are traumatised by basilisk considerations. From what I can tell almost all of the trauma is attributable to Eliezer's behavior. The descriptions of the experience give clear indications (ie. direct self reports that are coherent) that a significant reason that they "take the basilisk seriously" is because Eliezer considers it a sufficiently big deal that he takes such drastic and emotional action. Heck, without Eliezer's response it wouldn't even have earned that title. It'd be a trivial backwater game theory question to which there are multiple practical answers.

I get the people who've been frightened by it because EY seems to take it seriously too. (Dmytry also gets them, which is part of why he's so perpetually pissed off at LW. He does his best to help, as a decent person would.) More generally, people distressed by it feel they can't talk about it on LW, so they come to RW contributors - addressing this was why it was made a separate article. (I have no idea why Warren Ellis then Charlie Stross happened to latch onto it - I wish they hadn't, because it was totally not ready, so I had to spend the past few days desperately fixing it up, and it's still terrible.) EY not in fact thinking it's feasible or important is a point I need to address in the last section of the RW article, to calm this concern.