[lukeschlather]

From the article, it sounds like they're contributing to technological progress in some pretty remarkable ways. Their pneumatic diesel-powered factories sound incredible. They're not necessarily any better than your standard factories, but from an engineering perspective these sound like fascinating research laboratories.

Of course, these research laboratories are churning out a lot of high-quality modern furniture.

[light3]

Pneumatic power tools are nothing new:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tool "Air tools were formerly unpopular in the DIY market, but are becoming increasingly popular, and have always been ubiquitous in industrial and manufacturing settings."

Its sad that my statement is being down-voted without being refuted in any way.

[lukeschlather]

A few things:

> advanced the forefront of technology

This is a loaded phrase which makes some unwarranted assumptions. Are Ikea desks that can be made at 1/5th the cost but last 1/10th as long representative of the forefront of technology? I'd argue when it comes to furniture manufacturing, the Amish actually are at the forefront of technology. The Amish are Apple and Ikea is Sony.

> at least extremely sub-optimal.

This doesn't matter. Laboring under the assumption that tools X, Y, and Z are indispensable makes your average shop much less likely to discover tool Q that does all three jobs at once for a quarter of the effort and practically for free. The best technology often looks like nothing at all because you don't even know it's there.

> Pneumatic power tools are nothing new

Neither are computers. Your entire arguments are based on the unstated assumption that electricity and computers are required to make anything that is on the forefront of technology - this is not true. Electricity and computers are all well and good. There's nothing wrong with specialization.

If you look at things from the "good of scientific progress" perspective, it's a great thing that we have people like the Amish who arbitrarily cut off ties to certain technologies but not others. By necessity, they become the absolute experts at the technologies they keep. To us the better pneumatic drill is worthless, but it's still valid technological progress.

[light3]

>Are Ikea desks that can be made at 1/5th the cost but last 1/10th as long representative of the forefront of technology?

I refuted the example of technological progress being use of pneumatic tools, just look at car manufacturing, they're are an essential tool.

>Your entire arguments are based on the unstated assumption that electricity and computers are required to make anything that is on the forefront of technology.

No, my basic assumption is that education and freedom of thought are required for progress. The Amish have neither.

[lukeschlather]

I'm not saying that they're the only people using pneumatic tools out there, I'm saying that they're building new pneumatic tools every day, and some of them probably are pneumatic tools no one has ever built before. That's valuable to society at large if engineers from your car factories are visiting the Amish and swapping ideas.

Yeah, the Amish themselves aren't going to reap any benefits, and they probably aren't going to work as fast as people in a fancy lab, but they're also likely to find some one-in-a-million ideas you would never come up with in a fancy lab.