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nshepperd comments on A sense of logic - Less Wrong
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It's even more interesting to see how people react when faced with arguments that are either very bad or very good, but they can't tell which. I have described the doomsday argument to many random people. The typical reaction is a kind of nervous laugh, followed by quick dismissal. Not a single one became genuinely curious and tried to work it out. It's awful.
I don't think the doomsday argument is a bad argument mathematically. It's just completely useless, like predicting whether the sun will rise tomorrow using laplace's rule of succession. We have vast amounts of information that has some bearing one way or another on the likelyhood of the end of the world happening at any particular time. It's absurd to throw all that away. As such, dismissal seems completely reasonable to me. I really don't think there is anything to be learned by calculating the expected number of total people ever to exist using nothing but a uniform prior.