S
stevieb
Just another guy, really.
(First, know that I am not ragging on anyone here. If someone is tempted to take this personally, I would suggest they look inward, and ask themselves, "DOES this apply to me?" If the answer is "yes," or "it could," that person really needs to do some soul searching...)
A recent post about a part of guitar maintenance got me thinking- first about that specific issue, then about guitar maintenance in general, then about maintenance of machines in general (and really, a guitar is a sound-making machine.)
Too often, non-experts accepts expert advise with little or no critical evaluation. Too often, I see where advise from an "expert" is, as best one can tell, based on what someone told the "expert," which was accepted at face value, with little or no critical evaluation or testing- the procedure or material seems to work well enough the first time it is used, and thus is accepted as the best practice from then, on- sometimes for that person's entire career, thus screening out ALL other materials or procedures from consideration. Testing and evaluating new things can take time and resources, true, but the alternative could be horrible. To illustrate this with an extreme example, suppose someone suggested that the best thing to clean a fretboard with, was actually gasoline, re-packaged as Clean-Rite Fretboard cleaner. The Clean-Rite rep. makes a sweet-sounding pitch to our erstwhile "expert," even demo'ing it on a neck the rep has, and our boy listens intently and is totally awed. He stocks the stuff in his guitar and amp repair shop, sells several bottles (at a personal profit of $5.00 per bottle!) Guitar repair business has been slow, but two weeks later a guitar finally comes in that needs fretboard cleaning... Sorry, folks, I can't go on. The possible results are truly too horrible to imagine.
Shortly after graduating from college, I landed a job as a service advisor at a Porche/Audi dealership. The place had one Porche tech, "Harold," and he enjoyed something of a demi-god reputation among the Porche customers we had. Personally, I accepted his expertise at face value, and marveled at the cache he had among our customers- I was NOT a detractor. One day, I listened to him advise a customer on the finer points of using Rain-X (which causes rainwater to roll off the windshield- very cool stuff.) He advised cleaning the windshield with a Coca-Cola, saying the carbonated water was what did the cleaning. After the customer left, I asked the tech if perhaps club soda might work better than Coke, as it had no sugar and no artificial color in it. Thus, it had a greater quantity of cleaning agent (carbo water) and would not leave brown spots on a light-colored surface. You would have thought I suggested he get a DNA test to see if he was raised by his real mother- he puffed himself up as much as he good and basically told me I had no place questioning his advise.
I was quite perplexed by his reaction, until I realized he has his ego so wrapped around the way he did his job that he could not consider a suggestion by anyone who's name was not something like "Hans." Experts can get that way: they narrow down the source of truth to those who they respect, and thus put on draft-horse blinders that prevent them from even seeing, never mind considering, other sources of truth.
Technology is an on-going process. Newer methods or materials are being developed almost daily. Some turn out to be disasters, and some prove that the formerly-accepted best practice was actually a disaster, it's self. Remember in the mid 70's, when "long-chain polymer spray protectants" first hit the shelves? People loved putting on their dashboards- made them clean and shiny, and preserved them at the same time. Or did it? Some people began to believe it actually ACCELERATED dashboard deterioration. What's the truth? Who knows? A TRUE expert would know how to evaluate both the new and the old, to determine what would be the better. A hack would just shrug and say to himself, "This can make me money," or "Hey! People will worship me!" and adopt it, whole hog.
Ask yourself, which are you closer to? The true expert? Or the hack?
A recent post about a part of guitar maintenance got me thinking- first about that specific issue, then about guitar maintenance in general, then about maintenance of machines in general (and really, a guitar is a sound-making machine.)
Too often, non-experts accepts expert advise with little or no critical evaluation. Too often, I see where advise from an "expert" is, as best one can tell, based on what someone told the "expert," which was accepted at face value, with little or no critical evaluation or testing- the procedure or material seems to work well enough the first time it is used, and thus is accepted as the best practice from then, on- sometimes for that person's entire career, thus screening out ALL other materials or procedures from consideration. Testing and evaluating new things can take time and resources, true, but the alternative could be horrible. To illustrate this with an extreme example, suppose someone suggested that the best thing to clean a fretboard with, was actually gasoline, re-packaged as Clean-Rite Fretboard cleaner. The Clean-Rite rep. makes a sweet-sounding pitch to our erstwhile "expert," even demo'ing it on a neck the rep has, and our boy listens intently and is totally awed. He stocks the stuff in his guitar and amp repair shop, sells several bottles (at a personal profit of $5.00 per bottle!) Guitar repair business has been slow, but two weeks later a guitar finally comes in that needs fretboard cleaning... Sorry, folks, I can't go on. The possible results are truly too horrible to imagine.
Shortly after graduating from college, I landed a job as a service advisor at a Porche/Audi dealership. The place had one Porche tech, "Harold," and he enjoyed something of a demi-god reputation among the Porche customers we had. Personally, I accepted his expertise at face value, and marveled at the cache he had among our customers- I was NOT a detractor. One day, I listened to him advise a customer on the finer points of using Rain-X (which causes rainwater to roll off the windshield- very cool stuff.) He advised cleaning the windshield with a Coca-Cola, saying the carbonated water was what did the cleaning. After the customer left, I asked the tech if perhaps club soda might work better than Coke, as it had no sugar and no artificial color in it. Thus, it had a greater quantity of cleaning agent (carbo water) and would not leave brown spots on a light-colored surface. You would have thought I suggested he get a DNA test to see if he was raised by his real mother- he puffed himself up as much as he good and basically told me I had no place questioning his advise.
I was quite perplexed by his reaction, until I realized he has his ego so wrapped around the way he did his job that he could not consider a suggestion by anyone who's name was not something like "Hans." Experts can get that way: they narrow down the source of truth to those who they respect, and thus put on draft-horse blinders that prevent them from even seeing, never mind considering, other sources of truth.
Technology is an on-going process. Newer methods or materials are being developed almost daily. Some turn out to be disasters, and some prove that the formerly-accepted best practice was actually a disaster, it's self. Remember in the mid 70's, when "long-chain polymer spray protectants" first hit the shelves? People loved putting on their dashboards- made them clean and shiny, and preserved them at the same time. Or did it? Some people began to believe it actually ACCELERATED dashboard deterioration. What's the truth? Who knows? A TRUE expert would know how to evaluate both the new and the old, to determine what would be the better. A hack would just shrug and say to himself, "This can make me money," or "Hey! People will worship me!" and adopt it, whole hog.
Ask yourself, which are you closer to? The true expert? Or the hack?
