On the other hand, does not banning these debates contribute to having less of them? Doesn't seem so. We already had a dozen of them, and we are going to have more, and more, and more...

I can't know what happened in the parallel Everett branch where Eliezer didn't delete that comment... but I wouldn't be too surprised if the exposure of the basilisk was pretty much the same -- without the complaining about censorship, but perhaps with more of "this is what people on LW actually believe, here is the link to prove it".

I think this topic is debated mostly because it's the clever contrarian thing to do. You have a website dedicated to rationality and artificial intelligence where people claim to care about humanity? Then you get contrarian points for inventing clever scenarios of how using rationality will actually make things go horribly wrong. It's too much fun to resist. (Please note that this motivated inventing of clever horror scenarios is different from predicting actual risks. Finding actual risks is a useful thing to do. Inventing dangers that exist only because you invented and popularized them, not very useful.)