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Houshalter comments on Open Thread, Sept 5. - Sept 11. 2016 - Less Wrong
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Because as I said, most humans would never even think of the doomsday argument. So the argument can't apply to them. In order to get the mathematical guarantee that 90% of people who use the argument will be correct, you need to restrict your reference class only to people familiar with the argument.
More generally, the copernican principle is that there is nothing particularly special about this exact moment in time. But we know there is something special. The modern world is very different than the ancient world. The probability of these ideas occurring to an ancient person, are very different than to a modern person. And so any anthropic reasoning should adjust for that probability.
"The probability of these ideas occurring to an ancient person..."
In the ancient world it was very common to predict the imminent end of the world.
And in my own case, before ever having heard of the Doomsday argument, the argument occurred to me exactly in the context of thinking about the possible end of the world.
So it doesn't seem particularly unlikely to occur to an ancient person.
How so?
See the Gospels for examples.
That's what I thought you meant. But Christianity has existed for less than 4% of humanity's time, and what we ordinarily call "the ancient world" started 3000-6000 years earlier.
On the other hand fear of and end of the world (as they knew it) seems to be not unlikely at any time.
Creating reference classes as small as you like is easy. But the predictive power diminishes accordingly...
Double negatives exist to help hide what you're saying. If it's somewhat likely, show me a single clear example that predates Christianity. The story of Noah says such a flood will never happen again. The Kali Yuga was supposed to last more than 400000 years.