The analysis in the article explains why it applies to any phenomena that we might be able to notice.
replyThe argument given is the same as the one that I first ran across, not by that name, in https://www.nature.com/articles/363315a0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument claims that it was a rediscovery of something that was hypothesized a decade article.
I hadn't tried to give it a name, or thought to apply it outside of that context.
As for the mathematical qualms, I'm a big believer in not letting formal mathematical technicalities get in the way of adopting an effective heuristic. And the heuristic reasoning here is compelling enough that I would like to adopt it.
The argument sounds nice, but it's just wrong. It only works if most processes you're going to encounter that you know nothing about happen to be Lindy processes. If most processes happening around you that you know nothing about are not of that type, then the argument fails.
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