I'm not sure the conventional kind of basilisk qualifies as knowledge, as such: Langford's original story was about an image that crashes onlookers' brains through a defect in image processing, not through anything to do with verbal or logical parsing. Most other treatments of the concept have done the same, more or less, although there are some ambiguous ones (like the "Funniest Joke in the World" Python sketch).
There are various presentations of knowledge which clearly aren't mind-safe (and presentation and context usually matter more than the content), but their danger generally comes in the form of bias and related issues like priming effects, which of course is rather well-traveled ground on this site. I think we can explain the effects of bringing up racial IQ differences and other politically sensitive ideas perfectly well within that framework, without having to invoke any more fundamental problems; in fact, we do.
Upvoted for bringing the Langford story to my attention; I was not aware of it.
I continue to believe my explanation accurately describes the approach of a significant proportion of highly educated individuals expressing anti-racial differences views, whether or not those individuals are even aware of the general concept of mindkilling.
Today's post, Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? was originally published on 26 October 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was No One Knows What Science Doesn't Know, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.