It seems more elegant (and perhaps less fraught) to have the reference class determination itself be a first class part of the regular CEV process.
For example, start with a rough set of ~all alive humans above a certain development threshold at a particular future moment, and then let the set contract or expand according to their extrapolated volition. Perhaps the set or process they arrive at will be like the one you describe, perhaps not. But I suspect the answer to questions about how much to weight the preferences (or extrapolated CEVs) of distant ancestors and / or “edge cases” like the ones you describe in (b) and (c) wouldn’t be affected too much by the exact starting conditions either way.
Re: the point about hackability and tyranny, humans already have plenty of mundane / naturalistic reasons to seek power / influence / spread of their own particular current values, absent any consideration about manipulating a reference class for a future CEV. Pushing more of the CEV process into the actual CEV itself minimizes the amount of further incentive to do these things specifically for CEV reasons. Whereas, if a particular powerful person or faction doesn’t like your proposed lock-in procedure, they now have (more of) an incentive to take power beforehand to manipulate or change it.
It seems more elegant (and perhaps less fraught) to have the reference class determination itself be a first class part of the regular CEV process.
For example, start with a rough set of ~all alive humans above a certain development threshold at a particular future moment, and then let the set contract or expand according to their extrapolated volition. Perhaps the set or process they arrive at will be like the one you describe, perhaps not. But I suspect the answer to questions about how much to weight the preferences (or extrapolated CEVs) of distant ancestors and / or “edge cases” like the ones you describe in (b) and (c) wouldn’t be affected too much by the exact starting conditions either way.
Re: the point about hackability and tyranny, humans already have plenty of mundane / naturalistic reasons to seek power / influence / spread of their own particular current values, absent any consideration about manipulating a reference class for a future CEV. Pushing more of the CEV process into the actual CEV itself minimizes the amount of further incentive to do these things specifically for CEV reasons. Whereas, if a particular powerful person or faction doesn’t like your proposed lock-in procedure, they now have (more of) an incentive to take power beforehand to manipulate or change it.