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shokwave comments on A sense of logic - Less Wrong
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Even if it's really a bad argument, the badness is far from obvious - just look at the Wikipedia page. Robin Hanson doesn't find it silly, for example. Neither do I: in my opinion, anthropic reasoning is an important mystery because we have no algorithm for determining whether a given anthropic argument is valid. See Eliezer's posts "Outlawing Anthropics" and "Forcing Anthropics". Also consider that thinking hard about when anthropic reasoning works and when it doesn't has led Wei Dai to the central insight of UDT. I don't believe you have examined the object level as deeply as it deserves. Snap judgments only get us so far. A snap judgment cannot lead you from Zeno's paradox to discovering calculus.
The evidence and predictions surrounding our ability to extend our lifespans and solve life- and existence-threatening problems is enough to suppose that the human history is not closed at the far end, or not modeled on the same function that pre-actuarial-escape-velocity human history is.
That is, we have good reason to believe we are in the earliest of all humans, because "human" is two sets appended together, and the doomsday argument is based on the statistics of the first set alone.
That is my response to the doomsday argument - I don't know if it's rigorous.