I maintain my motorcycles but the romance around it is just a way to moralize fixing the consequences of my own negligence and incompetence:) That said, there's a life or death gravity to it, as the failure mode of a bike in motion can get a bit runny - and the romance is an instance of the idea that physical competence is fundamentally moral, which goes back to the stoics and Aristotle, and it underpins a lot of the hacker ethic.
The shortest summary of it I could describe is from the concept of "trueness," where you have a wheel or a reference point, a straight edge, or even just geometry, so you can physically apprehend what something is supposed to do as an objective ideal, and then you use that reference to reason, refine, and gauge your effort against it. Like the process of truing a wheel. Once you have an idea of what the perfect case is, chosing to align to that case is essentially moral.
In the case of a motorcycle, someones life depends on the integrity of your alignment to ensuring the trueness of the moving parts together. The effect of people generally choosing this now-moral alignment to precise measures and ideals produces desirable outcomes. This is what I think makes bike maintenance and other physical competencies philosophical, as their logic translates into metaphors pretty seamlessly.
Great article anyway. His comment on the public good of providing live saving organs is funny and accurate:
> The supply of organs and tissue from motorcycle riders has gone up in recent decades, especially in the 22 states that still don’t have helmet laws.
The shortest summary of it I could describe is from the concept of "trueness," where you have a wheel or a reference point, a straight edge, or even just geometry, so you can physically apprehend what something is supposed to do as an objective ideal, and then you use that reference to reason, refine, and gauge your effort against it. Like the process of truing a wheel. Once you have an idea of what the perfect case is, chosing to align to that case is essentially moral.
In the case of a motorcycle, someones life depends on the integrity of your alignment to ensuring the trueness of the moving parts together. The effect of people generally choosing this now-moral alignment to precise measures and ideals produces desirable outcomes. This is what I think makes bike maintenance and other physical competencies philosophical, as their logic translates into metaphors pretty seamlessly.
Great article anyway. His comment on the public good of providing live saving organs is funny and accurate:
> The supply of organs and tissue from motorcycle riders has gone up in recent decades, especially in the 22 states that still don’t have helmet laws.
It's why EMT's call them donor-cycles.