That Which Cannot Be Poked With A Stick Is The Mind-Killer

For part one of the aspirant sequence - which may or may not be arranged into some totally different order when I'm done with it, because the connection here won't be obvious yet - see Would you work harder in the least convenient possible world?Partly in response to: Politics is the Mind-Killer and Politics is Hard Mode Part One: A Tale Of Two Houses Two groups of rationalists live in houses across the street from one another, as is tradition in San Francisco. One Monday night, in the Purple House, everyone is having a debate about the prison abolition movement. Alice thinks that prison abolition is an irresponsible fantasy which would lead to murderers and arsonists running around doing whatever crimes they wanted. Bob thinks that prisons are a moral horror equivalent to slavery and that Alice doesn't care about the human rights of prisoners. They get quite heated for a few hours, then their housemate Charlie reminds them that they're rationalists and that they should identify a crux. It turns out that the crux is whether, in the absence of prisons, the crime rate would go up a lot. Alice and Bob can't test this - they can't get rid of prisons and see what happens - so they both go to bed frustrated.In the Orange House, Deanna and Ethan are debating something terribly boring and unimportant. Deanna thinks that cutting behind the Walgreens is a shortcut to the metro station. Ethan thinks that, because that route sometimes results in waiting at an extra traffic light, it actually takes longer on average to walk that route than to simply go through the park - and the park has the nice bonus of getting to walk through some pleasant grass. Their housemate Francis suggests that they could just go and test this, so they take twenty minutes out of their day to go outside and resolve their argument. They both walk to the station on their preferred route, and Deanna arrives three minutes earlier. They then walk to the junction with the traffic signal, and time it. They disco