Presumably they also went to non-Jewish doctors if they had a medical emergency on the Sabbath.

Nitpick: Jewish law permits and in fact requires the breaking of Biblical commandments if someone's life is in danger (exceptions: idolatry, murder and breaking sexual taboos). In fact, there's an old Jewish joke that I think gets at some of the moral weirdness you're bringing up here:

A Jew and his Christian friend are sitting down for dinner at a restaurant. The Christian recommends the cheeseburger, but the Jew says that, since he keeps kosher, he's forbidden from eating any meal with both meat and dairy.

The Christian asks whether the Jew would eat a cheeseburger if his life depended on it, and the Jew says that Jewish law allows someone to break a ritual law if zir life is in danger. So the Christian draws a handgun, points it at his Jewish friend, and says "Order the cheeseburger, or I'll shoot!"

After dinner, the Christian puts his gun away and apologizes to the Jew. "You know I never would have shot you," he says. "I just wanted to see what you would do. Please forgive me."

"Forgive you?!" asks the Jew. "Of course I won't forgive you! Why didn't you make me order the bacon burger?"

In conclusion, if your morals make you wish someone would come along at gunpoint and force you to break your moral system, you may also be in error :)

using terminology from my goodhart's law post, In most religions, G is to be a good person and G is the bunch of laws to be followed. The presence of Shabbos Goyim anywhere in your process is a very serious case that your Gs are flawed.

Nice Post and Nice discussions.

If we could charge users just a little bit of money, just a fraction of the cost of running their programs, we could probably do this. Then people wouldn't be so cavalier about running a program repeatedly that takes 500 CPU hours each time you run it.

But we can't, because we're an academic institution. So that would be evil.

You mean like the academic journals that charge subscription fees?

That proscription is just wrong, in exactly the way you would expect laws written by uneducated tribal people to be wrong.

There's nothing wrong with assuming that in the ancient past people were less educated than they are now, and the general claim "religious beliefs are stupid" has been proven to the LW community's satisfaction. You, though, are making two claims that go far beyond these truisms: (1) that uneducated tribes are stupid in some specifiable pattern X, and (2) that "don't lend interest" exemplifies pattern X.

I wish you... (read more)

I'm not sure why you picked hasidic. It sounds like you are confuing hasidic with haredi which is roughly speaking the general ultra-orthodox population. The hasidim are a specific strain of orthodox Judaism which arose in the last 1700s. But many haredim are not hasidim. In any case, the Shabbat goy has nothing to do with either the larger category or the smaller category. Note also that neither category describes all of Orthodox Judaism.

You are incidentally correct that orthodox Judaism does not believ that gentiles have to obey the Torah. However, I'm ... (read more)

I've talked with an Orthodox Jew who thought the Shabbos goy was very contrary to the spirit of the law-- he said (I haven't verified this) that Shabbos goyim were first instituted in north-eastern Europe where keeping a fire going in the winter was a matter of life and death, and therefore required-- but that Shabbos goyim were eventually employed for matters of mere comfort and convenience.

The Amazon example doesn't seem to be that illustrative of the concept you are trying to get across, mostly because the reason academic institutions don't sell computation is that they aren't set up for it, not that commerce is considered evil. They have no problem charging for other services, such as tuition.

Here's a better one: police, military, and government in general. Everyone in that role has slightly different moral codes than the rest of us, in that they are able to legitimately employ violence in various forms, and for the most part we are willing to cede that role to them. The government is our shabbos goy, although too often a master rather than servant.

I wonder if the low rating of this post is because people are more touchy about Jews than they are about Christians. People here think it's fine to criticize Christianity all day. Shouldn't it be equally acceptable to criticize Judaism? (I criticized both.)

I'm going to put up 4 replies to this comment, in matched pairs for karma balance. If you vote, vote on both comments in a pair. Comment if you found one pair harder to vote on.

ADDED: Wow, the results surprised me. I would have found it hard to upvote "Judaism is stupid". My brain would direct it, but my finger would protest.

The orthodox jewish position is consistent with using shabbos goyim. They maintain that the jewish nation was created for a specific purpose ("light to the nations", whatever that means) and their legal (vs. moral) code is the result of this setup; it is only meant to apply to the jews. There is a separate body of law "seven laws of children of Noah" that are universal, and much closer to a "moral code". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah

My funny story, though cannot confirm that it's true, was about a very capable shabbos goy who after some years turned out to be jewish.

Relevance to LW?

Interesting, but I don't understand how Amazon helps you. If you release your software in a form that users can easily upload and run on EC2, presumably you'll have to simplify the dependencies anyway (Sybase, huh), so users can just as easily run it at home. Or am I missing some part of the story?

If we could charge users just a little bit of money [...] But we can't, because we're an academic institution. So that would be evil.

I doubt very much that the people who made this decision were considering the moral implications. Far more likely, they decided based on economics. It sounds like a good decision to me, from what you've presented here.

I really don't think it's appropriate to equate a business decision with religious craziness, not without more evidence that they're behaving irrationally.

I had heard that Christians at some point were forbidden from charging interest on loans, and I had heard that Jews at some point were forbidden from charging interest on loans, but finding out that Jews were allowed to charge interest to Christians but not to other Jews and vice versa was a WTF moment for me.

My experience with Amazon cloud has been rather positive. Very much unlike my experience with live sysadmins, who are all terrible human beings by nature of their job. I'd really rather not go off the cloud ever.