What about those nasty shock sites you sometimes see on the 'net, or really sickening jokes/short stories where you wish you'd not seen/heard them?
They are not basilisks. Basilisks do real damage to you, they don't make you nauseous. To get the general idea of the concept see RationalWiki. That illustrates what apparently constituted a basilisk for certain psychologically vulnerable individuals. Of course others would warn you that you shouldn't discover what an alleged basilisk is on the off chance that it actually is one!
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.