Hey, I'm one of the founders of CFAR (and used to teach the Reference Class Hopping session you mentioned).

You seem to be misinformed about what CFAR is claiming about our material. Just to use Reference Class Hopping as an example: It's not the same as reference class forecasting. It involves doing reference class forecasting (in the first half of the session), then finding ways to put yourself in a different reference class so that your forecast will be more encouraging. We're very explicit about the difference.

I've emailed experts in reference class forecasting, described our "hopping" extension to the basic forecasting technique, and asked: "Is anyone doing research on this?" Their response: "No, but what you're doing sounds useful." [If I get permission to quote the source here I will do so.]

This is pretty standard for most of our classes that are based on existing techniques. We cite the literature, then explain how we're extending it and why.