All discussion about days and months was to illustrate that despite my uniqueness, my properties (which are not relevant for knowing about DA) still look randomly chosen from the set of all available properties. In other words, my month of birth and the fact that I know about DA are “mutually random” variables. It is mostly the same for the year of birth, but here it is more complicated, as not all years are fit for random picking, but those which are after 1800 approximately.
For example, if I know that you birthday is in 8th month of year, but I don’t know the total number of months in a year, I could estimate that with 50 per cent probability the year has 16 month, which is very close to real value of 12. My birthday in in 9th month, so it will be 18 months estimation.
Yes, I think that the most correct referent class is the class of those who knows about DA. This implies the “end” soon, in the decades. I have a large text which overview this and other my ideas about DA here.
Guessing the number of months by my birthday is essentially treating me as an sample. It is a valid method because if we take the birthdays from a large number of people then the estimation would converge on the true value. However in this logic framework no individual is inherently unique. Everyone belongs to the same reference class. So here we shouldn’t use the concept of first-person me, or actual me, which automatically stands out from all others. Instead each individual, including myself, shall be treated equally and be specified from a third-person perspective by features. And as I have argued previously Doomsday Argument do not work if the individual is specified by features. It requires the use of first-person me and treat it as an ordinary number of a false reference class.
All discussion about days and months was to illustrate that despite my uniqueness, my properties (which are not relevant for knowing about DA) still look randomly chosen from the set of all available properties. In other words, my month of birth and the fact that I know about DA are “mutually random” variables. It is mostly the same for the year of birth, but here it is more complicated, as not all years are fit for random picking, but those which are after 1800 approximately.
For example, if I know that you birthday is in 8th month of year, but I don’t know the total number of months in a year, I could estimate that with 50 per cent probability the year has 16 month, which is very close to real value of 12. My birthday in in 9th month, so it will be 18 months estimation.
Yes, I think that the most correct referent class is the class of those who knows about DA. This implies the “end” soon, in the decades. I have a large text which overview this and other my ideas about DA here.
Guessing the number of months by my birthday is essentially treating me as an sample. It is a valid method because if we take the birthdays from a large number of people then the estimation would converge on the true value. However in this logic framework no individual is inherently unique. Everyone belongs to the same reference class. So here we shouldn’t use the concept of first-person me, or actual me, which automatically stands out from all others. Instead each individual, including myself, shall be treated equally and be specified from a third-person perspective by features. And as I have argued previously Doomsday Argument do not work if the individual is specified by features. It requires the use of first-person me and treat it as an ordinary number of a false reference class.