[echoradio]

I find the Amish’s perspective on technology interesting. Especially now, I respect the lengths they have gone through to preserve community over expediency.

I was particularly intrigued by “The Amish seek to master technology rather than become its slave.”

I love the conveniences tech offers, but I also worry about the digital habits that have turned into unhealthy addictions. Where in the technological progression did we tipped from technology being a tool to being a handcuff. Broadband? Wi-Fi? Smartphones?

Given the deep ties to tech here on HN, I am curious to know if there are others here who have similar thoughts.

[cik]

I use technology, rather than allowing it to us me - as does my family. We're Orthodox Jews, but more than that we (as in my family) fail to see the majority of the utility most technologies provide. Effort saving technology is fantastic - but many others simply get in the way of the type of life I'd like to live, rather than reinforce it. While I love my Sabbath - I don't personally think that the forced disconnection from electronics is the healthy habit people need - regardless of my personal religious inclination. Establishing and reinforcing their primary selves over the years, while learning to use technology seems to be the real need, something that permeates due to lifestyle.

My children play with their friends, in meatspace. They co-ordinate doing so with WhatsApp or Telegram. This is the healthy balance. What they don't do is spend unending amounts of time playing video games, watching movies, or ever play a mobile game. They go to the movie theatre, or watch <insert streaming thing> with their friends should they want. But they don't do this every single day. Some use Khan Academy for play-based learning, all use their eBook readers for the unlimited books on whatever topics may interest them, for when we're out of treepubs.

Our trees are watered via a bluetooth drip irrigation system. Our groceries are delivered once ordered via an application. They walk to the local market to buy fresh in-season vegetables when we run out. During the week, when we study Torah we can access the history of exegesis through tablets. On Shabbat and Holidays we use books. It's balance.

[wiz21c]

Pfiuuu... You live in wonderland ! Congrats for getting your kids to do that !

How did you prevent your kids being sucked into tik tok and so on ? I tried, but failed :-( (at some point, I had to check what they do to make sure they don't spend too much time on these but, well I just couldn't handle the amount of checking I had to do)

[raindear]

Maybe it depends on the attitude of the other parents in your child's class.

[aaaaaaaaata]

Answered your own question.

[djenendik]

Thanks for this comment. One thing I'm curious about is the influence of advertising. Is this something that is discussed at the community level? Say with your rabbi?

[aliqot]

There are as many perspectives on the doctrine as stars in the sky. A computer is a tool of my trade, it is a part of my work. A phone, or one of the fancy cable TV's on the other hand, is not, and those have a much more pernicious nature, so I don't have them.

Not everyone is a beachy amish, not everyone is a schwartzentruber like you see in movies or imagine when you hear "Amish". You might have a hard time finding any one town where everyone has the same commitments, except for the schwartzentrubers, mainly due to it being the simplest lifestyle. Most of us just prefer a community centered, simple family unit with as much harmony with our neighbors as possible.

[avidphantasm]

Just looked up the Schwartzentruber Wikipedia. Very interesting to learn of all of these sub-groups. I also find it interesting that the Schwartzentruber do allow the use of motorized washing machines. My guess is that the women do most of this work, and aren’t having it with manually cleaning clothes and raising umteen children.

[peteradio]

I wonder if moderate Amish would consider nuclear in any form? For the sake of argument let's say there is a small scale reactor that would behave as large batteries with essentially zero risk and limitless energy. Could that replace the diesel generators or is diesel seen as more predictable? Would Amish ever consider a technology which allows them to produce their own diesel fuel even if it was somewhat complex?

[MichaelCollins]

Maintenance-free nuclear power plants are a pipe dream. Self-contained fail-safe reactors with enough fuel to last a very long time might be possible, but that is only part of a nuclear power plant. To make power with that reactor you need all the rest of the nuclear power plant around it. Water intake, heat exchanges, steam turbines, etc, etc. Diesel engines are relatively straight forward compared to all this. I think it would be easier to talk them into producing biodiesel for themselves (assuming they don't already.)

But if they're going to buy something high-tech once and keep it running themselves for years, wind turbines or solar seem more promising.

[NateEag]

An Amish farm not too far from me (and not too far from Elizabethtown College, where TFA is from) has a solar panel on the barn roof. Noticed it while driving past about a month ago.

I don't know what sect the family belongs to, but a couple months ago I drove past on a Sunday morning and saw over twenty buggies parked in the pasture, nary a car in sight, so I'm confident they're at least not in a car-owning group.

[peteradio]

Let's say its a pitch to hook them up to the electric grid since its become so utterly reliable?

[wodenokoto]

As a kid I hated that we couldn’t watch tv in the living room for dinner but instead had to sit in the dining room with no tv. My parents were so uncool. Didn’t they now my classmates could watch TV during their dinner?

When I moved out I started taking all my meals with tv and later video on my computer.

I’m now in my thirties and I see the value of my parents decision.

I don’t live in the states, but I read online that cinema in the states are quite noisy. Where I live, the main benefit to me of going to the cinema is the forced focus. Dark room. No pause ability, no phones, no talking.

I’ve seen a few “no Wi-Fi, no laptop” cafes and thought them silly, but I’m starting to turn around. It would be nice with a no smartphone cafe, but I’d still want a picture …

My point is: no, you’re not the only one with these concerns and I think you are right that there was a tipping point where we “lost”, but the battle has been ongoing for a long time.

[1123581321]

Theaters are quiet here except during big or funny moments.

[pandaman]

This depends on the base you are comparing to. In the home country people did not talk in the theater, literally they would sit silent during the whole show. Nor did they eat. So people talking, and loudly chewing, and sipping in the US was a shock to me.

[1123581321]

I can see the food being surprising. High concession prices serve as a check on widespread consumption, thankfully. There are theaters that advertise serving good meals during the movie, but they arrange seating, engineer audio and enforce their no-disruption policies so that other moviegoers aren't noticeable.

[pandaman]

I've yet to be in a theater in the US where I can't hear people talking and phones beeping unless it's almost empty. The issue is not that I cannot hear the film as theaters routinely crank volume up. My issue is that I expect immersion from a theater, which does not happen with all the noise.

[tristor]

You should go to an Alamo Drafthouse.

Honestly, I agree with you, there are a lot of people in the US that casually treat public spaces as if they are theirs alone, and this sort of rudeness and selfishness permeates the culture. Some subcultures are worse than others about this.

The only cinema in the US I don’t hate is Alamo Drafthouse.

[1123581321]

Well, that's a bummer. I can only plead it's not universal!

[wodenokoto]

I only know what I read on Reddit and they sure make it sound like cinema is a place of constant chatter and phone conversations

[1123581321]

The sooner you learn not to trust what teenagers and bored 30-year-olds write on reddit, the better. :) It's not healthy when one person's single and potentially unreliable anecdote can be boosted hundreds to thousands of times.

[spywaregorilla]

movie theaters are quiet here too?

[MichaelCollins]

It depends on the movie, and maybe on the neighborhood.

[elmomle]

The Amish have the right idea. If the point of helpful technology is to help us to better achieve our goals, the fact that we find ourselves drawn to devices like moths to flames strongly implies that the technology is not helpful. If even well-educated technologists unthinkingly find themselves filling free time with mindless (i.e. without prior prefrontal cortex planning) browsing, what chance is there for other folks? It's not a dignified way to be--we're just big rats pressing glowing levers to get dopamine spikes.

[overtonwhy]

There's value to random encounters with ideas and content (sometimes).

[mantas]

It’s like sugar. There’s an evolutionary reason for it from old times when it was scarce. But nowadays it’s all around us and leads to diabetes if not limited.

[faeriechangling]

Conservatism has its benefits, but I didn't see the Amish get rich off the Dotcom boom either.

[monkeywork]

Really fail to see the value of that comment. I haven't seen any FANG/Startup creators sustain themselves building quality furniture or barns either...

Kind of an odd measure of if their values are a good idea or not

[thatguy0900]

What would a rich Amish even do? The same as they always have. Some Amish around me in Ohio actually got quite wealthy selling oil rights on their land, they put all the money into a general emergency fund for their fellow Amish and continued on.

[MichaelCollins]

In Pennsylvania, the Amish are reputed to be quite wealthy (at least by local standards.) Shrewd and thrifty businessmen who often buy properties outright with surprising quantities of cash. I haven't dealt with them personally, but this is what I've heard about them from people who have.

[verisimi]

Yes, but then they don't pay tax either, so maybe they have used those extra funds to buy fields etc.

[avidphantasm]

The site posted indicates that they do pay most taxes, except for FICA, for which they have a religious exemption (dear god, don’t anyone tell the Christian Nationalists about this exemption).

[1123581321]

Any group that qualifies for the employment tax exemption already knows about it. They have to be in one of several groups that are known to have existed for several decades, and either have their own mutual benefit program or conscientiously object to the taxes for religious reasons. That list includes far right, far left, and moderate adherents.

(Sometimes clergy from mainline or popular denominations will also claim it. There is some grey area in interpreting legitimate conscientious objection.)

[lotsofpulp]

> There is some grey area in interpreting legitimate conscientious objection.

A ton of unnecessary gray area, and a violation of separation of church and state to give preference to certain tribes over others based on political influence.

[beambot]

If I had to pick a catalyst, I'd go with monetization based on impressions or duration of use -- e.g. ad-based business models. The feedback loops hyper-optimized addictive behavior targeting serotonin.

[__blockcipher__]

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with prediction of reward (aka desire/craving/addiction). Serotonin is very complex (in humans) but more about social-emotional processing.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter you’re thinking of. And also glutamate since glutamatergic firing in brain reward pathways are heavy associated with addiction

[beambot]

My bad. You're absolutely right: Dopamine, not serotonin.

[avidphantasm]

And I would say this started with TV, well before the Internet. Maybe radio too? But I want to say that visual media are especially addictive? I wonder if there are any studies comparing social media addiction across sighted and non-sighted communities.

[silisili]

I feel like if our government were more like that, we as a world would be in better shape.

Sure we'd be 'set back' by most standards, but we also wouldn't have global warming.

I'm not an expert of the Amish, but I assume they are generally happier than the average American. At the very least, less stressed.

I've heard enough rumors to know it's not a perfect community, but I still think there's a lot we can learn from them.

[eloff]

It's not just a "set back", it's a fantasy. There's a hundred times too many people on this Earth to live like that. We've leveraged up our population using technology, and there's no way to unwind that without also eliminating almost everyone. Nor would we want to. Say what you will about the ills of technology, but I'm so much happier to be living now than a hundred years ago. Life is better by nearly every way you want to measure it. We'll have to get ourselves out of the climate mess the same way we got into it - with technology.

[tresqotheq]

> Life is better by nearly every way you want to measure it...

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fs...

Also life is much better today for a weak, stupid person. 100 years, or even 40 years back, your life would be hell due to people giving you a hard time.

Today you would be put on a pedestal and worshiped for your shortcomings...

> We'll have to get ourselves out of the climate mess the same way we got into it - with technology.

And get into another one by doing it. Flawless logic.

Human beings should start being humble and realisitic about their capability to predict the effects of thier actions on environment, and start messing with it less. Not more. If humanity as a whole, has the capability to JUST FUCKING STOP, I would have much hope for the future. But no. Humanity has as much ability to course correct as that of a flying hippopotamus.

[loonster]

>Also life is much better today for a weak, stupid person. 100 years, or even 40 years back, your life would be hell due to people giving you a hard time.

40 years ago, an imbecile could support himself doing menial labor. Now not so much.

[tresqotheq]

> an imbecile could support himself doing menial labor. Now not so much.

Yea, Today an imbecile could run the country..I would leave the specifics to your imagination..

[loonster]

I would classify the imbeciles in politics as: senile, alcoholic, or corrupt.

None of them were born stupid.

[Thorrez]

I don't understand what you mean by stupid weak people being put on a pedestal and worshipped.

[loonster]

Not OP, but I do notice that many reality shows like to highlight someone's adversity as major reason that they should win.

[Thorrez]

Adversity doesn't mean stupid or weak though. Let's say a person made it to a certain level of success in life. If that person faced adversity along the way, the person likely had to be smart and hardworking to overcome the adversity. If the person didn't face adversity, the person might have coasted to that point and might not be smart and hardworking.

[MichaelCollins]

> Life is better by nearly every way you want to measure it.

Wealth inequality, environmental destruction, and mental illness.

Pick your narrative and you can find metrics that support it.

[mensetmanusman]

If you believe women, their self reported life satisfaction over the last century has gone down precipitously.

[loonster]

Maybe that is caused by women that would have been unable to be polled actually giving their opinion.

(Not that I believe this. Just giving a plausible counter explanation.)

[aero142]

I think it will be viewed as a common vice like alcohol and gambling. I wonder if we will see something like a temperance movement.

[inglor_cz]

An intriguing question: could a temperance movement against digital services organize itself offline? Most, if not all, movements right now coalesce online. Perhaps people already forgot how to do this in the real world, much like they forgot how to navigate with paper maps.

[schroeding]

And could they even still communicate effectively? Except landline and snail mail, what kind of possibilities are there left to exchange / propagate messages?

Pagers are (more or less) dead. Telegrams are dead. Fax is (more or less) dead. Newspapers are dying.

Amateur Radio, Flyers and public squares would still work, though.

[mgdlbp]

APAs and letterzines?

[Broken_Hippo]

I hope not. I refuse to go back to the loneliness I had before the internet. It is a wonder that I didn't kill myself before I exited my teens. My entire present life would have been a crapshoot before the internet - it is how I wound up meeting my spouse and moving overseas, after all (and yes, a stable relationship, over a decade long after moving).

[justinclift]

> I wonder if we will see something like a temperance movement.

We probably already are seeing a form of it. With "temperance" to online advertising being adopted wholesale via the likes of Ublock Origin and other ad blockers.

Then there are the people who've Degoogled, Unfacebooked, (etc).

If (!) substantially more people continue to avoid Google, FB, (etc) it could become an actual Movement.

Hopefully it happens, in a positive (for humanity) way. :)

[nerdbaggy]

I have some Amish friends. Most have cell phones, they just can’t come into the house. But barn is fine. Most of them have them out of necessity. Calling vendors, emergency calls, etc

[Nextgrid]

> Where in the technological progression did we tipped from technology being a tool to being a handcuff. Broadband? Wi-Fi? Smartphones?

It's not about technological progression, it's ethics and legislation.

Back in the day you would either not build user-hostile technology on ethical grounds, or the law would quickly catch up and outlaw your practice, or you just wouldn't get the funding necessary to do. For example, when some politician's video rental history was threatened to be made public, a law was quickly passed to outlaw the practice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act) and when Google (I think) initially announced plans to use targeted advertising based on personal data they initially backtracked due to the huge negative public reaction at the time.

Somewhere however the tide has turned and building user-hostile technology started being socially acceptable and rewarded by the market. People/companies that we call "VCs" even started specializing in funding said technology, all while regulation took a backseat.

[croes]

These sort life only works if you are protected from outside

[freemint]

> I was particularly intrigued by “The Amish seek to master technology rather than become its slave.”

This could also be a post hoc justification that sounds good.

[dotancohen]

I disconnect on Saturdays, just like religious Jews do. I'm not religious, but I piggyback on their custom to enjoy one day off. Not a day off work, a day off being available to whoever wants my time, whenever they want my time.

From what I understand, Knuth entirely stopped using email in 1990, for a similar reason. But for Knuth, at that point, he was already using email for 15 years.

[jrm4]

100%. I love their approach. It harmonizes so much with how I try to think about every new bit of technology and it's served me very well. Some practices it has inspired for me;

- Absolutely NO social media on the phone. Computer only.

- Relatedly: Turned off ALL phone notifications except those that come from real-life human beings who I know personally.

- Paid hosting and perhaps more importantly, email. Self hosting is a pain, but I want the control and reliability. To me, it's an incredibly bad idea in the hands of e.g. Google. I need to be able to talk to a human who can fix things if it breaks.

[legitster]

> I was particularly intrigued by “The Amish seek to master technology rather than become its slave.”

The Amish actually fascinate me in this regard. If you've ever met with an Amish person, they are far from primitive or dumb.

When the Amish communities were first founded, they were technologically no different than the groups around them. Just anytime a new technology is introduced, Elders host a discussion about how they would adopt it as a group. So it ends up as some Amish have telephones and some don't and etc.

[overtonwhy]

The misuse of television for pure unrestrained capitalism seems like it was a pretty significant setback both socially and environmentally. Was radio much better? Is it parasocial relationships?

[plankers]

it all started going wrong once those damned horseless carriages started hitting the streets

[tomcam]

There is no evidence at all that Internet usage, social media, and non-arranged marriages make people statistically happier.

[cornel_io]

Arranged marriages are barbaric and effectively rape in many cases, though, especially when they are forced based on threats of disownment or worse, which is common depending on the culture. In some places it is a lot more explicitly threatening. I don't really care whether people who are abused and brainwashed into signing on to participate in and perpetrate on the next generation horrific practices claim to be fine with the crap themselves, that's basically the story of every abusive religious practice ever, beat kids into thinking God will hate them unless X and they're going to tell you X is amazing as adults.

[klipt]

That's not how most arranged marriages work, it just means instead of getting options from Tinder, people get options through their parents' social network.

Which usually means they're more selected for things the parents like (well respected in the community) rather than things that look good in pictures (shirtless pics).

But they're still options, not compulsions.

[lotsofpulp]

I think any useful definition of arranges marriage involved one or both parties not having a say in it, or maybe where one party has such a better negotiating position (such as immigration rights to the USA), that it precludes any other notions of compatibility.

[klipt]

That's a common (and racist) perception of how arranged marriages work but it's not how the majority of them actually work.

[lotsofpulp]

It is not racist. I have family members who were married without consent of both parties. That is an arranged marriage with a distinct difference than that of a marriage that happens with the consent of both parties.

Getting introduced to a potential partner by family or friends and then dating is not any different than flirting with a partner and then dating, for the purposes of describing the circumstances that resulted in marriage.

[implements]

I think common-sense suggests being involuntarily married and obliged to have regular sex with someone not of your choosing probably leads to an unhappy condition, particularly if your community also punishes or forbids divorce or separation, particularly if you’re female.

Who or what do socially conservative practices like arranged marriage, prohibition on fornication, restriction on contraception (etc) serve? - the maximisation of happiness … or … often paternalistic control over a population for the greater benefit of a socially powerful elite?

[Alt-F4]

> what do socially conservative practices like [...] prohibition on fornication [...] serve?

Women and men who have had only 1 sexual partner are happier in their marriages:

https://ifstudies.org/blog/does-sexual-history-affect-marita...

There's also the big benefit of essentially eliminating STDs.

In my view, a lot of it comes down to what does sex mean? To me, sex says "I love you so much I want our love to overflow into new life. I love you so much I want to raise a child with you." Raising a child within a marriage is generally much better than raising a child outside of a marriage.

> restriction on contraception

One big problem with contraception is that it's not reliable. The pill has a 7% failure rate on average, and condoms have a 12% failure rate on average. People use contraception thinking it will prevent a pregnancy, but they're wrong.

> benefit of a socially powerful elite

I don't really understand how a prohibition on fornication benefits a powerful elite. The elites in the media industry seem to be promoting fornication in movies, TV shows, books, videogames, etc. I think elite men often want to use their position to have sex with a lot of women, which would be easier if women are ok with fornication. Also they won't be regarded as hypocrites if they say what they're doing is ok. Take for example Aziz Ansari. A woman accused him of some bad sexual thing. Much of the media defended Aziz saying it was just awkward sex, and that's not unethical. If Aziz had been publicly against fornication though, the media wouldn't have defended him.

[mym1990]

What does this comment have to do with what the parent comment said?

[Banana699]

I believe my outlook towards politics and society is substantially Amish-like, in that I (utterly and devoutly) hate industrialised, massive, yet so lonely and atomised, societies, and I believe the blood-tied extended family is the only reasonable unit you can build a healthy community on. https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=32265182 is one comment where I express those views.

There is nothing I despise more than what I call "The Economist Fetish", you know how it goes, "GROWTH! GDP! CAN EARTH SUPPORT 10 TRILLION PEOPLE?!! LETS FIND OUT!!", economists, as the namesake implies, are the most infested with this intellectual disease, but milder forms are endemic to a lot of modern people. A perverse and virus-like fascination with growing and expanding, a bizarre sexual pleasure derived from imagining life blown up to monstrous proportions. Someone with this disease have a rather curious inability to think about limits and ranges of validity : Can we humans, evolved for 1/4 million years to live among tightly-knit communities, live sanely in those infestations we call modern cities? Can the ecosystem, usually an incredibly balanced and intricate contraption based on animals eating each other to avoid overflowing resources, handle a species hitting 10 billion soon? An economist-fetishist have no patience for those questions, the rush for "GROWTH" overrides all conscious thought and sensation, like a drug, leaving only the raw sexual desire for more, more growth, more humans, more fuel, more cities and cement, more molding of the universe according to ugly and short sighted designs.

I like the Amish, in another life I would have loved living among them (if they allow strangers), despite my atheism. They are as far as you can go against the perverse idea of "society" and toward the more humane "community" without a full-fledged revolution.

[justinclift]

> blood-tied

Sucks for all the adopted people then, and those with lots of non-blood-related bonds. :/

[tresqotheq]

Humans beings can be divided into two classes. The exploiters and the exploited. Exploiters are constantly looking on ways to do more efficient exploitation. So every new technological "thing" that get discovered, will be considered by the exploiters to do more efficient exploitation.

So every thing, even if this thing have huge potential to do good, will eventually be discovered by the exploiters to do more efficient exploitation. I will go even further and will say that things that does not aid much with efficient exploitation won't attain wide spread usage in this day.

For example, we got a TV in each home, becuause that would help with more efficient exploitation. Each of us have a full color, slab like smart phones with a dozen listening devices with 24x7 internet connection because, yea you guessed, it, because it helps exploitors to squeeze that last drop of juice out of you...

Now I am not saying that there is a self declared bunch of exploitrers that decides which tech should go mainstream, but I think this is sort of emergent behavior, given the primal instincts in each and every one of us human beings..