>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.

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.

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).

Most leaders in the Western/developed world have similar paranoid thought processes.

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.