Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and around the alt-rightTheology buffs will recognize this as just a variation of Pascal's wager, which it was, but carefully tailored to work within a particular system, and deliberately framed in terms of the popular meme 'The Game,' where the only rules are that you lose any time you think about the game. But for all that its basic contours are familiar, it's crucial to realize that Roko arrived at his Basilisk honestly and sincerely, assembling premises widely accepted by the LessWrong community until he found himself unexpectedly transfixed by its gaze. The result was a frankly hilarious community meltdown in which people lost their shit as ideas they'd studiously internalized threatened to torture them for all eternity if they didn't hand over all their money to MIRI, culminating in Yudkowsky himself stepping in to ban all further discussion of the dread beast.