It is also asymmetric. If you announce your presence, even if 4 out of 5 civs that notice you don’t annihilate you immediately (but they probably should), the fifth might. It’s just a probability game, with permadeath.
So hiding is the most rational - the only - strategy of survival.
This is a paranoid and cynical strategy that doesn't win out in the known history of life. What works is grow, expand, mingle, maintain - assimilate but don't annihilate.
>This is a paranoid and cynical strategy that doesn't win out in the known history of life. What works is grow, expand, mingle, maintain - assimilate but don't annihilate.
Uhh, yes it does. You are thinking of humans. Humans can mate with other humans. They can assimilate. Now, think of invasive species. What do they do? They don't mate with the natives, learn their culture, respect and give them space. Quite the opposite on all counts. They do what they do in their resource game. They might not out compete the natives and they might peter out. Or, they do out compete the natives, and before long, there aren't any natives or that careful equilibrium that was established beforehand.
And what would you learn from that? Even if it could be said that those things attempted to implement that strategy and failed, you can't really infer much about its overall viability by looking only at losers.
The dodo bird is an example of something that was isolated and then got steamrolled when the herd came around.
You can always zoom out and look at the bigger picture, it's not even about individual species but life as a whole. "Hide and isolate and wall off" is not successful in the long run.^ Your only chance is to keep up with the herd.
If we look at human civilizations, which ones successfully isolated and hid from (real or hypothetical) bigger badder ones? Neither isolation nor annihilation is ever a winning strategy. Fear is the mind-killer.
^ Save for things like extremophiles that have found their way into a tiny niche that nobody else wants. They may survive but they don't flourish and prosper.
>which ones successfully isolated and hid from (real or hypothetical) bigger badder ones?
South Sentinel Island, famously. Still existing in the stable equilibrium established a millenia ago. Oh but they don't have iphones. Big whoop. If our modern supply chain falls apart due to climate change, not an unrealistic bet, we are finished and will probably kill ourselves and you and I will die in the violence to come. They will not even notice anything, and will exist as they have existed for millenia more. Their civilization and state of technological development is actually far more robust than ours.
I always read the dark forest differently. Solution to the problem is not a game-theoretic "hide from the apex predators", but an even more nihilistic "remain hidden, expand and evolve into the apex predator".
Or in a more biblical sense: do unto others before they do unto you.
Leaders are one thing, and sort of a product of the pressures of their position, but over longer time scales and evolutionary cycles, "isolate in fear" isn't really a dominant strategy. You're gonna get behind and get wiped out eventually, or be constrained to a hyper-specific niche.
It's specifically referencing the central idea of the book mentioned in the first sentence of the paragraph.
> Did you get to read the Liu Cixin’s second 3-body-problem novel? - The Dark Forest. Well some of you did …
The author of this post then provides a good summary of the idea in the next few sentences, but remember there is an entire book around this premise (and a first book that sets it up and a third book explores it even more).
A typical outlook from 21st century human thinking. We love to draw from our still rather actual history of fear and addictions to zero-sum games, to extrapolate the far advancement of other civilizations. As millennia go by, species can obviously only evolve technologically, while remaining psychologically, philosophically, and spiritually stuck.
So hiding is the most rational - the only - strategy of survival.
This is a paranoid and cynical strategy that doesn't win out in the known history of life. What works is grow, expand, mingle, maintain - assimilate but don't annihilate.