The Shabbos goy

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 had specified what sorts of errors "uneducated tribal people" are especially prone to making, so that we could evaluate your claims.

In my opinion, Bronze Age agricultural tribes were well-advised not to charge tribal members interest! Because of the vagaries of nature and the low levels of technology, even a hard-working and relatively intelligent Bronze Age yeoman farmer might occasionally need a cash loan to keep his farm running. When he did, there was a decent chance that one of his fellow tribesmen actually would lend him the money at no interest -- tribes had an interest in keeping tribal ownership over their land, and if no loan was made, the failed farmer's land would pass out of the tribe. Because members of the tribe were closely related in terms of genetics, ideology, and social ties, altruism within a tribe was a fairly strong force, and repayment on a zero-interest loan could be effectively enforced with threats of ostracism.

Allowing people to charge each other interest in this scenario would only result in a small increase in the number of hard-working but nevertheless failing farmers who were able to secure loans. It -would- result in a large increase in the number of greedy consumers who would be able to secure loans, because instead of lending to "your brother" out of a sort of tribal altruism, you're lending to "your customer" for the sake of the interest, or, more accurately, the collateral. Since the discount rate was incredibly high in ancient times on account of how war, plague, and drought were likely to destroy investments and extreme poverty made people 'impatient,' the commercial interest rate would also have been extremely high...maybe 200% or 300% on an annual basis even for a reputable lender. There's no way that most farmers would be able to earn that kind of rate of return, so they would wind up losing the land that they put up as collateral to their creditors. Thus, the main effect of allowing commercial interest would be to concentrate good farming land in the hands of savvy loan sharks.

This seems to me like the kind of problem that's worth passing legislation to solve.

Obviously, today we think the risk of capital being concentrated in the hands of loan sharks is trumped by the reward of at least some capital flowing to entrepreneurs, and we're probably right. But in ancient times, there weren't nearly as many entrepreneurial opportunities -- higher transportation costs, slower technological growth, and huge discount rates made most kinds of entrepreneurship impossible.

In regards to your postscript, it's certainly possible that the use of Shabos goyim by Orthodox Jews is logically consistent, but it doesn't stop there! One of, to me, the most fascinating examples of this sort of patching is Shabbat technology. The example that always strikes me is the Shabbat elevator, which is quite common in Israel. Basically, it's a normal elevator, except that during the appointed period of time it operates in a much different manner: constantly cycling through the floors and stopping on every single one. This way 'observant' Jews are able to get to the high floors without having to push a button. (There are actually a number of Modern Orthodox families in my 16 story apartment building in Maryland, but I think they use the stairs on Shabbat, especially as our elevators are more likely to break down than anything else...)

I suppose one could argue that the elevator has become a Shabbat robot and that robots, like goyim, are exempt from Halakha, but these technologies are designed and built for the sole purpose of, from the religious perspective, cheating God. It baffles me how anyone can actually see this as a valid use of technology while still claiming to observe Shabbat. Bill Maher actually visited a company that designs and builds a large variety of Shabbat machines in Israel in Religulous where they demonstrated some more such technologies such as a compressed air-powered Shabbat wheelchair.

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 not sure that's not due to a universal moral rule. The belief is generally defended by claiming that there is something metaphysically different about Jews or physically different. For example, there are hasidic sources which argue that keeping the specific commandments for Jews have direct reverberations on the world which make things in general better. That doesn't happen for non-Jews. The distinction between a universal moral law and a non-universal moral law isn't so clear. For example, if my universal moral law contains the rule "people who are HIV+ should not have unprotected sex" arguably this is just a non-universal law for HIV+ people rather than a universal. What quantifiers and qualifiers are acceptable in such rules for them to be universal is not clear to me.

(Incidentally, if we are talking about hasidim in particular, classical hasidic thought has some things which unambiguously separate Jews from non-Jews in really nasty ways. For example, some hasidim believe that Jews have a holier soul than non-Jews. Others declare non-Jews to be intrinsically less moral. For example, the Tanya, one of the formative texts of the Lubavitch hasidic movement, says that non-Jews can't engage in actual altrusim but will only be altruistic for selfish reasons whereas Jews can engage in genuine altruism).

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 find it fascinating that the original post's "We need a jew" was unacceptable, but the modified post of "We need a Shabbos goy" is perfectly fine. Especially because in the original post the moral failing was the christians', whereas in the modified post the moral failing is the jews'.

And even more so because I too feel emotionally motivated to dislike and down-vote the first while supporting the second, specifically because the first one feels anti-semitic and the second doesn't... even though the opposite seems to be true.

Perhaps it's because the term "we need a jew" signals ownership, resulting in objectification and degradation of the subject? We need a Robin Hanson in here!

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.

This is a nice and unexpected parallel. I think I may notice more instances now that I know the general pattern. Thanks for writing it up.

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.

In Orthodox Judaism, based on Biblical passages, the Sabbath was given to Israel. As you mention non-Jew's are neither expected nor encouraged to keep the Sabbath.

That being said, despite the popular notion of a "Shabbos Goy" it is generally forbidden in Orthodox Judaism to benefit from a gentile's violation of the Sabbath. One is certainly forbidden to tell a non-Jew to break the Sabbath.You are not allowed to have a non-Jew turn on the light for you and he did it without being asked you may not utilize the light. While there are some exception most of them have weak support. A notable exception is a great deal of leniency was practiced with regards to non-Jew's starting fires on the Sabbath to heat homes, since this could be a health issue.

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.