When I was Motorcycle Mechanics Institute's curriculum developer, I was charged with creating, updating and qualifying nearly all of the school's 4000 hours of training material, including a unique, elective, special interest course called "Early Model". This being far from my specialty, I benefitted from access to some really talented people, "subject matter experts", technical writers call them. One of them still lingers in my memory, thirty years later. He knew more about 1930s to 1950s Harley-Davidsons than anyone I have ever read, talked with or worked with. Like me he was a career mechanic who had lived what he knew and really knew what he knew. He was old and had an astonishing wealth of experience. I miss that fella, and it was awesome to meet with him! I realize now that in exploring his valuable but largely specialized and therefore largely unappreciated knowledge, I was previewing my later self. That is, one day I too would be a sort of anachronism, out of place and out of time, however much the expert in my field. It is all the more frustrating when far less qualified online "experts" go to war with you, insisting that their superficial knowledge can compete with more than fifty years of actual, vocational immersion in the product.

Not long ago I ran across an interesting book. Tom Nichols, formerly with The Atlantic magazine and a retired PhD professor at the U.S. Naval War College, authored, The Death of Expertise. In it he observes that modern society increasingly rejects the notion of professional expertise, convinced rather that in a democracy, everyone's opinion is equally valid. What an odd, fallacious, defective idea! However, it describes well many powersports user forums. They have rejected nearly everything I've had to say, often vehemently and ad hominem. I'm not saying I'm better than them. I'm not even saying I'm all that different, necessarily. There are whole worlds of knowledge I am ignorant of, just as they are of vintage Honda maintenance. Nobody knows everything. I'm only saying I'm in a different space than their space. And they are spaces, or spheres--distinct, non-overlapping, indifferent, divorced, non-communicating. Incompatible, even. I have written extensively on the huge divide between career mechanics and motorcycle forums, but suffice it to say, information gleaned from the Internet tends to be that classic "mile wide and an inch deep". Those who rely on forums rarely encounter emperical data, let alone best practices.