creating to investigate over and over again and killing after each periodic report update that would probably be a good plot for a story where the investigator finds some way to rebel or save the civilization from his kindred or so on but again we have to remember the key point about alien overlords not being stupid and us need to think from their perspective there are several ways that come to mind to safeguard against that investigator going rogue like putting a camera in his eye a position tracker in his chest and a bomb in his brain we also want to not just always be thinking from the position of the hunter when trying to think of hiding a civilization but from the position of a potential leader of such a civilization who is as capable of contemplating hunter's action as we are when picking whether to try to hide from them that decision to hide is essentially one being made in the absolute ignorance of the state of affairs in the wider universe except by logical deduction from your own world and basic physics and astronomy odds are such civilizations are already aware of the dangers of making decisions that way when making a decision you want to know as much as possible but we have approaches for dealing with various degrees of ignorance and uncertainty when making decisions where we don't anticipate being able to get more useful information in time for the decision bayesian analysis would be an example of that but two others we discuss a lot on the show are the mediocrity principle and the anthropic principle both are designed to help you draw a basic best conclusion when you know next to nothing the mediocrity principle is the one we use in science and law to take a handful of samples of something or even just a single one and draw conclusions about that something it's the thinking pattern that says if you meet NUMBER_TOKEN people and see brown blonde red and black hair on their heads they were probably fairly normal and mediocre examples of the species and those are the hair colors most folks have we know that's not universally true meeting someone with a very abnormal and artificial hair color or walking around with a wig or a feather headdress is going to throw you off even more so if you only get to meet one human but most of the time it will be mostly right again it is not the best method if you have good data but it is one of the two best methods for looking at things when you know very little and don't expect to get more information the anthropic principle is a very different approach to the same thing acting in ignorance it's the one where you assume you the observer are skewing the results of your observations by existing it's the acknowledgement that you are encountering intelligent folks with various shades of hair because you are an oxygen-breathing life-form who likes to walk on sidewalks or inside climate-controlled buildings so you see them more often than say whales or dolphins or chimpanzees who rarely have blonde hair let alone artificially died hair two key points on that first a civilization making decisions be they hunter or hider is aware of both the concepts and their limitations so not only are they trying to expand their data pool to be less ignorant but they also know that just because their sample size of life forms encountered has risen to millions giving them a great statistical table for a life is likely to form and how it grows or behaves that they still need to be contemplating the anthropic principle and asking if their own observational approaches are skewing the data letting them hide or leading to
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