<story><title>Amish Hackers (2009)</title><url>https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mdip</author><text>The Amish are really misunderstood by people on the outside (myself included).  This article does a great job of addressing those misconceptions and I enjoyed reading it after a long afternoon spent talking about the subject with a friend who was a midwife to the Amish community in northern Indiana[0].  My knowledge up to that point was &amp;quot;Those are the folks that I get my turkeys from who ride around in buggies.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The conversation started with an odd statement -- she had 7 children under 18 all home-schooled at least until High School (they were given the choice to attend public school at that point) and is a devout Christian.  I was asking her why she allowed them to attend public school in High School given her rigidity on the merits of Home Schooling and her involvement in the Home Schooling movement.&lt;p&gt;She said &amp;quot;They know enough to graduate by the time I&amp;#x27;m done with them, so it&amp;#x27;s an opportunity for them to evangelize to the other kids and enjoy themselves.  I even let them attend an occasional party provided it&amp;#x27;s not an &lt;i&gt;Amish party&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I chuckled ... wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to be negatively influenced by The Amish!  I had no idea what &amp;#x27;rumspringa&amp;#x27; was at that point.  She explained and I don&amp;#x27;t think I blinked the entire time.  Her son pointed out &amp;quot;The Amish have the best cars and every hard drug around&amp;quot;.  Rumspringa[0] is a period of time after age 16 where Amish children are basically allowed to live conventionally in order to make the decision, on their own, if they want to join the community as adults.  Many buy (really nice) cars, many -- having experienced freedom for the first time in their lives -- make every mistake a late teenager can make and seem to make it at a level that pales in comparison to my experience as a teenager.  The cynical -- and she was one -- believe it is used to &lt;i&gt;encourage&lt;/i&gt; children to make every mistake the modern world has to offer so that they are &lt;i&gt;trapped&lt;/i&gt; into making the choice to join the Amish community.&lt;p&gt;Because of my experience buying Amish turkeys, which are sold as cage free, hormone free, and otherwise considered superior from a health-standpoint to conventional turkeys[1].  I was surprised to find out that my midwife friend didn&amp;#x27;t buy Amish turkeys despite being &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; into the &amp;quot;all natural&amp;quot; way of thinking[2].&lt;p&gt;The article mentions that the technology choices which are allowed are limited by the parish and are inconsistent among parishes.  Gas engines are usually allowed.  Electricity is allowed with some restrictions, though AFAIK, being off-grid is required -- if you can generate it from solar&amp;#x2F;gas generator, it&amp;#x27;s OK and gas refrigerators or gas generators powering refrigerators were allowed.&lt;p&gt;While Amish Turkeys may not use conventional methods -- hormone-free&amp;#x2F;pesticide-free feed -- such is not the case with pretty much anything else.  Velveeta, apparently, can be found in large quantities in every Amish kitchen in the community she served and is used in so many meals that she turns down Amish meals.  Gelatin (non-desert Jello) is another staple of the diets of the people she served.  Her take was &amp;quot;Amish food is unhealthy and disgusting&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Outside of that, she explained to me that &lt;i&gt;literally everything is grown conventionally&lt;/i&gt;.  The parish she serves has no rules against pesticide use&amp;#x2F;GMO&amp;#x2F;conventional fertilizers and the like are &lt;i&gt;common&lt;/i&gt; -- basically anything that will keep a plant from dying is &lt;i&gt;common&lt;/i&gt;.  On the surface, this was a strange thing for me to wrap my brain around given my Amish Turkey experience, however, the explanation she gave was &amp;quot;Velveeta notwithstanding, they rely on their own farming for the majority of their food and use the most effective&amp;#x2F;least expensive options available in order to make sure there&amp;#x27;s enough&amp;quot;.  I still can&amp;#x27;t get over the Velveeta.  Nasty.  Her opinion was that among the conventional farms, Amish farms were &lt;i&gt;the worst&lt;/i&gt; and she wouldn&amp;#x27;t consume &lt;i&gt;anything&lt;/i&gt; grown on an Amish farm.&lt;p&gt;As a midwife, though, she had a bit of experience with some of the darker side of Amish life (a lot is explained in The Devil&amp;#x27;s Playground).  Bed Courtship is among the oddest practices for a community that believes per-marital sex is evil.  More than a few of her baby-delivery roles were for late teenage girls who became pregnant before they were married.  The practice involves, basically, bringing a girl home to lay in the same bed with as part of a date.  Sex is forbidden, and it sometimes includes a barrier that is supposed to separate the two participants, but that practice is rare (as is Bed Courtship, in general).  Her opinion was that Bed Courtship, much like &amp;#x27;rumspringa&amp;#x27;, is designed to &lt;i&gt;cause&lt;/i&gt; children to make mistakes that result in them feeling forced to stay Amish for life.&lt;p&gt;A small anecdote I share with people choosing to make a switch to a programming&amp;#x2F;IT career was that her husband -- an IT systems analyst -- worked with a gentleman who was Amish up until his late 20s[3].  He was a former-Amish software developer.  &amp;quot;If that guy can do it, anyone can.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[0] I strongly recommend the documentary The Devil&amp;#x27;s Playground if you want to learn about &amp;#x27;rumspringa&amp;#x27;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.imdb.com&amp;#x2F;title&amp;#x2F;tt0293088&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.imdb.com&amp;#x2F;title&amp;#x2F;tt0293088&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] I don&amp;#x27;t challenge those labels, but I also can&amp;#x27;t validate them.&lt;p&gt;[2] She refused to buy pasteurized milk, opting for milk from a neighbors farm.  Her husband refused to drink it without passing it through their own pasteurizer.&lt;p&gt;[3] Yes, they do shun family members who leave the community.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amish Hackers (2009)</title><url>https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adrianN</author><text>The Amish can evaluate the effects of new technology on their communities by having the rest of the world act as a guinea pig. I think society as a whole could benefit from thinking about the effects of new technology on communities before adopting it, but reasoning about that from first principles seems very hard and putting the genie back into the bottle after a technology has been widely deployed is essentially impossible.</text></comment>