Iunno, quantized networks are pretty discrete. It seems a lot of the continuity only really has value during training. (If that!)
> So's this. It's true; no system of rationalism can be correct because the real world isn't discrete, and none are better than this one, but also this one isn't correct. So you should not start a religion based on it.
I mean, nobody's actually done this. Honestly I hear more about Bayes' Theorem from rationality critics than rationalists. Do some people take it too far? Sure.
But also
> the real world isn't discrete
That's a strange objection. Our data channels are certainly discrete: a photon either hits your retina or it doesn't. Neurons firing or not is pretty discrete, physics is maybe discrete... I'd say reality being continuous is as much speculation as it being discrete is. At any rate, the problem of induction arises just as much in a discrete system as in a continuous one.
> Example: if someone comes to you and tries to make you believe in Russell's teapot, you should ignore them even though they might be right.
Sure, but you should do that because you have no evidence for Russell's Teapot. The history of human evolution and current AI revolution are at least evidence for the possibility of superhuman intelligence.
"A teapot in orbit around Jupiter? Don't be ridiculous!" is maybe the worst possible argument against Russell's Teapot. There are strong reasons why there cannot be a teapot there, and this argument touches upon none of them.
If somebody comes to you with an argument that the British have started a secret space mission to Jupiter, and being British they'd probably taken a teapot along, then you will need to employ different arguments than if somebody asserted that the teapot just arose in orbit spontaneously. The catch-all argument about ridiculousness no longer works the same way. And hey, maybe you discover that the British did have a secret space program and a Jupiter cult in government. Proposing a logical argument creates points at which interacting with reality may change your mind. Scoffing and referring to science fiction gives you no such avenue.
> But a reasonable real world analog would be industrial equipment, which definitely can kill you but we more or less have under control. Or cars, which we don't really have under control and just ignore it when they kill people because we like them so much, but they don't self-replicate and do run out of gas. Or human babies, which are self-replicating intelligences that can't be aligned but so far don't end the world.
The thing is that reality really has no obligation to limit itself to what you consider reasonable threats. Was the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs a reasonable threat? It would have had zero precedents in their experience. Our notion of reasonableness is a heuristic built from experience, it's not a law. There's a famous term, "black swan", about failures of heuristics. But black swans are not "unknown unknowns"! No biologist would ever have said that black swans were impossible, even if they'd never seen nor heard of one. The problem of induction is not an excuse to give up on making predictions. If you know how animals work, the idea of a black swan is hardly out of context, and finding a black swan in the wild does not pose a problem for the field of biology. It is only common sense that is embarrassed by exceptions.