Some philosophers have been bold enough to suggest that only people who have contemplated the Doomsday argument (DA) belong in the reference class 'human'. If that is the appropriate reference class, Carter defied his own prediction when he first described the argument (to the Royal Society). A member present could have argued thus:
Presently, only one person in the world understands the Doomsday argument, so by its own logic there is a 95% chance that it is a minor problem which will only ever interest twenty people, and I should ignore it.
(from here)
If the DA's lifetime is governed by the principle of indifference and the Copernican principle then based on the length of its current existence, and assuming that it is randomly drawn from a reference class of probabilistic speculations it is 95% certain that it will be refuted before the year 2500.
If the DA is not itself subject to these principles then its assumption that the human race's survival-time can be modeled using them appears to be a paradox (to Lansberg & Dewynne).
(from here)
Hm, interesting. It is a bit unfair to talk about what the first person to formulate the doomsday argument could have used it to predict, for the same reason it is unfair to talk about what the first people to exist could have used the doomsday argument to predict: being the person who comes up with an idea that becomes popular is rare, and we expect probabilistic arguments to fail in rare edge cases. Also, the self-referencing doomsday argument rebuttal offers a counter-rebuttal of itself: It is more recent and has been considered by fewer people than the doomsday argument has, so it will probably have a shorter lifespan. (yes, I thought of the obvious counter-counter-rebuttal.)
Ideas developed with Paul Almond, who kept on flogging a dead horse until it started showing signs of life again.
Doomsday, SSA and SIA
Imagine there's a giant box filled with people, and clearly labelled (inside and out) "(year of some people's lord) 2013". There's another giant box somewhere else in space-time, labelled "2014". You happen to be currently in the 2013 box.
Then the self-sampling assumption (SSA) produces the doomsday argument. It works approximately like this: SSA has a preference for universe with smaller numbers of observers (since it's more likely that you're one-in-a-hundred than one-in-a-billion). Therefore we expect that the number of observers in 2014 is smaller than we would otherwise "objectively" believe: the likelihood of doomsday is higher than we thought.
What about the self-indication assumption (SIA) - that makes the doomsday argument go away, right? Not at all! SIA has no effect on the number of observers expected in the 2014, but increases the expected number of observers in 2013. Thus we still expect that the number of observers in 2014 to be lower than we otherwise thought. There's an SIA doomsday too!
Enter causality
What's going on? SIA was supposed to defeat the doomsday argument! What happens is that I've implicitly cheated - by naming the boxes "2013" and "2014", I've heavily implied that these "boxes" figuratively correspond two subsequent years. But then I've treated them as independent for SIA, like two literal distinct boxes.
In reality, of course, the contents of two years are not independent. Causality connects the two: it's much more likely that there are many observers in 2014, if there were many in 2013. Indeed, most of the observers will exist in both years (and there will be some subtle SSA issues of "observer moments" that we're eliding here - does a future you count as the same observer or a different one). So causality removes the independence assumption, and though there may be some interesting SIA effects on changes in growth rates, we won't see a real SIA doomsday.
Exit causality
But is causality itself a justified assumption? To some extent it is: some people who think they live in 2013/2014 will certainly be in a causal relationship with people who think they live in 2014/2013.
But many will not! What of Boltzmann brains? What of Boltzmann worlds - brief worlds that last less than a year?
What about deluded worlds: worlds where the background data coincidentally (or conspiratorially) imply that we exist on the planet Earth around the Sun, in 2013 - but where we really exist inside a star circling a space-station a few seconds after the seventh toroidal big bang, or something, and will soon wake up to this fact. What about simply deluded people - may we be alien nutjobs, dreaming we're humans? And of great relevance to arguments often presented here, what if we are short-term simulations run by some advanced species?
All these are possible, with non-zero probability (the probability of simulations may be very high indeed, under some assumptions). All of these break the causal link to 2014 or other future events. And hence all of them allow a genuine SIA doomsday argument to flourish: we should expect that seeing 2014 is less likely than is objectively implied, given that we think we are in the year 2013.
Is anthropic decision theory (ADT) subject to the same doomsday argument? In that form, no. In any situation where causality breaks down, your decisions cease to have consequences, and ADT tosses them aside. But more complicated preferences or setups could bring doomsday into ADT as well.