Humans in funny suits are more meaningful to humans.
I'm rather baffled by the "failure of imagination" line about Star Trek. That only applies if the purpose is to tell a story about how actual alien contact would go, as opposed to telling a series of stories about humanity. The author of that line is suffering a failure of imagination about the purpose of science fiction, which is rather different than the purpose of an exercise in pure imagination.
Today's post, Humans in Funny Suits was originally published on 30 July 2008. 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 Interpersonal Morality, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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