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Notes -
I agree, however there is also something to be said about arbitrary selection of the reference class. For instance in doomsday argument it is just assumed that humanity is a reference class. Why not all hominids? Why not just all accounts that are subscribed to The Motte including bots? Using the latter example both bots and human users have something in common - they are subscribed to The Motte. But there is not much else to be said for it or infer from it. It may be the case that even if two concepts are overlapping in certain category, it is erroneous to assume that there may be some meaningful knowledge gained by projecting information you have from one well researched concept (let's say in this case well known human users) onto other concept (in this case bots). Including basic information regarding how many are there to be in the future or some such.
The origin story of doomsday argument is supposed to be WW2 Allied intelligence operation, where they observed number painted on German tanks and ascertained how many of them were likely produced using statistics. But in that case the reference class was well defined and grounded. For instance intelligence agencies were interested in all German tanks already produced - they were not interested in tanks produced in WW1 or Leopard tanks produced in 2020. They probably had some hard intelligence regarding how the numbers were assigned - e.g. that they were assigned sequentially and not randomly as is the case for instance with certain countries/states vehicle license plates. They also had additional data, for instance if they observed a tank numbered 1,000,000,000 they would have known that their methodology is flawed as it was not physically possible for Germans to have one billion tanks.
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