David Langford coined the term basilisk, in the sense of an information hazard that directly harms anyone who perceives it, in the 1988 science fiction story "BLIT."

Peter Hurford argues in "You Have a Set Amount of Weirdness Points; Spend Them Wisely" that promoting or talking about too many nonstandard ideas simultaneously makes it much less likely that any one of the ideas will be taken seriously. Advocating for any one of veganism, anarchism, or mind-body dualism is difficult enough on its own; discussing all three at once increases the odds that a skeptical interlocutor will write you off as 'just generally prone to having weird beliefs.' Roko's basilisk appears to be an example of this phenomenon: long-term AI safety issues, acausal trade, and a number of other popular Less Wrong ideas are all highly unusual in their own right, and their combination is stranger than the sum of its parts