Today's post, Seduced by Imagination was originally published on 16 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Vagueness usually has a poor name in rationality, but the Future is something about which, in fact, we do not possess strong reliable specific information. Vague (but justified!) hopes may also be hedonically better. But a more important caution for today's world is that highly specific pleasant scenarios can exert a dangerous power over human minds - suck out our emotional energy, make us forget what we don't know, and cause our mere actual lives to pale by comparison. (This post is not about Fun Theory proper, but it contains an important warning about how not to use Fun Theory.)

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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 Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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