Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

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The lengths wealthy people go to outdo one another are just absurd. I heard a segment on the radio about the Atlantic salmon fly-tying community, who tie based on historic patterns that used ever rarer bird feathers.

Modern tiers are faced with a choice now that the birds that were rare then have become even rarer (or extinct): Tie with something else, or find a source of authentic feathers.

The segment was an interview with the author of The Feather Thief[0], who investigated the lengths one "enterprising" tier went to to acquire authentic feathers, destroying the historical scientific record for whole species in the process.

It seems insane that a fad of rich men from a long time ago becomes the obsession of a subculture of the larger fly tying community and that the result of that is a hole in the scientific record. It's enough to make you wish that folks would get obsessed with growing rare pineapples instead.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44153387-the-feather-thi...

Fashion and status signaling happen in all kinds of ways, and always have. It doesn't have to be only the rich, just look at the status of sneakers amongst low-income Americans. People like to stand out just like animals might have ever bigger horns/peacocks/claws/colors to signal that they're a great mate.

The larger body of work here is called 'signaling theory' and you can see it apply equally between animal and human domains. Pineapples first started as honest signals because only the wealthy could afford them. But once people started renting pineapples they became a dishonest signal, until the economics finally made it crash into either a costly signal (you should know they're no longer in vogue) or a lack of information at all (today).

>the status of sneakers amongst low-income Americans.

Not to discount your point, but there are a lot of very, very wealthy sneakerheads. It isn't low-income Americans that pick up 10k worth of limited designer run sneakers on launch day.

There might be, but it doesn’t really change that it’s a big status signal amongst lower income groups. The wealthy might like them but 10k doesn’t even register as a wealthy signal.

Ironically, those sneakers aren't made to last, and disintegrate after 10 or 20 years.

Beats a pineapple

Touché

That they’re not made to last is exactly what makes them an even better signal of status.

10 or 20 years! Isn't that much longer than the average pair of shows lasts?

When you're talking about fly fishing, you're already selecting for {time to fish} && {unwilling to pursue the most efficient method of catching fish}. So it's not a leap to && {slightly crazy}.

(Said as a fly fisherman)

I remember seeing fly fishing rights for sale on a stretch of the Spey - I think it was something like £40,000. Which I initially though was amazingly expensive.

Then I realised that just for one week a year!

Also, the statistics they provided suggest that each fish you caught would cost about the same as a cheap car.

It's a weird sport from a human perspective.

You get folks who just do it as a hobby (because it's not that expensive), die hard folks who live it (but aren't that wealthy), plus ultra-wealthy folks (who are generally jealous of the former!). I think it's the peace and tranquillity that attracts.

Add to that, that at least in the US, Trout Unlimited is without a doubt the most politically-connected pure sportsperson lobbying organization.

"At either end of the social spectrum there lies a leisure class."

What you described is also true for skiing, scuba diving, mountain diving and any number of other outdoor pursuits.

Apparently in the US there are about: 7M fly fishers [1], 9M skiers + snowboarders [2], about 3.2M SCUBA divers [3], 14M "active camping households" (3 or more times in a year) [4], and 48M hikers [5]. To pull a few outdoor activities, because I was curious.

Fly fishing feels more like bird-watching to me though: in that it's relatively easy and cheap to do, but not a thing you would ever do accidentally.

[1] https://outdoorindustry.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2018-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/376710/active-skiers-and... [3] https://www.dema.org/store/download.aspx?id=7811B097-8882-47... [4] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170315005391/en/Cam... [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191240/participants-in-h...

Hunting/fishing in Europe is traditionally something the landed gentry did and priced accordingly. It's all orders of magnitude cheaper in the US and Canada.

I’d suggest fishing in Scotland is expensive because of American money driving up prices.

Ownership of "sporting" estates in Scotland is pretty varied:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-47963208

NB Doesn't matter who owns it, we can still walk over it!

Are Americans buying land in Scotland specifically for fly fishing? Not that I don't love visiting Scotland, it just seems unnecessarily expensive and far when Montana offers vast areas of (to my knowledge) world-class fly fishing without an international flight.

It very much depends on the type of hunting or fishing though - coarse and sea fishing is a very popular activity. Mind you - you can go fishing in some very nice spots for relatively small amounts of money:

e.g.

http://www.glensherup-fishery.co.uk/

> {unwilling to pursue the most efficient method of catching fish}

What's the most efficient method of catching fish?

What's the most efficient method of catching fish?

Explosives, hands down, by a wide margin. Most people aren't optimizing for pure efficiency though.

Dutch commercial fishers devised a way to electrocute fish and scoop them up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_pulse_fishing

Leaving aside commercial methods or more...shall we say, exotic methods like explosives or elecroshock, bait fishing is generally more effective.

I do both: I trot bait when the river I fish is unsuitable for the fly.

Big nets.

For my money it's gotta be a fish wheel.

https://youtu.be/xVnRHN2u5GM?t=321

> What's the most efficient method of catching fish?

Currently? Very large industrial fishing nets.

Yet the last time I watched an industrial fishing net unload they dumped about a ton of bycatch to the sea lions. They are pretty efficient at killing unwanted species.

https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/insight/understanding-bycatch...?

>Unwanted catch is an issue both ecologically and economically. Animals that are discarded often die and cannot reproduce, impacting marine ecosystems. Bycatch can slow the rebuilding of overfished stocks, and place protected species such as whales and sea turtles at further risk. Bycatch of species like corals and sponges can cause damage to protected corals and to important fish habitat.

> The lengths wealthy people go to outdo one another are just absurd.

I’m not sure this is limited to wealthy people. I see plenty of non-wealthy people taking 5-year car loans that they can’t afford in order to purchase a luxury car.

Pineapple as status symbol; car as status symbol.

It might just be a human trait not dependent on wealth, like ostentatious male peacocks showing off their plumage.

> taking 5-year car loans

I think you mean 7-year car loans. Or a lease.

I know a couple of show offs who lease because it means they can always have a late model BMW

> The lengths wealthy people go to outdo one another are just absurd.

Have you heard of "luxury beliefs"? [1]

[1]: https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...

That is slightly different.

Wealthy people who want to signal wealth display conspicuously expensive things, which pineapples once were. That’s obvious enough. Luxury beliefs are about expressing class, which is distinct from wealth though somewhat correlated.

In fact, signaling wealth, or signaling it crudely enough, often signals lower class.

That's amazing: "middle class" (pedantically, upper working?) beliefs rebranded as "luxury". In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king?

As a former New Yorker, I learned to take anything in the NY Post with a very large grain of salt.

In my mind, they have yet to live down the "Headless body found in topless bar" front page article.

https://nypost.com/2015/06/09/new-york-post-editor-and-film-...

A fully accurate headline and article, also reported on by all major NY newspapers, albeit under less clever headlines.

Was luck enough to get a tour of the bird's egg collection at National History Museum at Tring, and also see some of the huge number of "skins" they also had. We were there to donate my father-in-law's egg collection - which they only accepted because it had his collecting notes from 30's and 40's (illegal now to even have such a collection I think). Anyway they did require passports to be presented when we arrived for tour, and said security was upped since someone had a tour and then came back and stole a significant amount of the skins.

This American Life did that radio series on it, with the author of that book. Pretty wild story

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/654/the-feather-heist

Thank you, couldn't remember where I'd heard it!

I mean paying multiple millions to fly into space is gotta be up there. “I saw Earth from Space!”

At least that's a unique human experience that countless numbers of our species have dreamed of doing one way or another. The same cannot be said of fly fishing.

I imagine there are many fly fishermen and women that would disagree with you.

And as a percentage of the population, I'd be willing to wager they're far smaller than the number of humans who've looked up at the sky and dreamt of what the Earth looks like from the cosmos.

I think we’re deviating a bit here. My point was that while most people might dream that, by and large going up there in space enabled by complex technology is in a few ways similar to asserting wealth via pineapples or large yachts or exotic cars. Yay, I got money, I can do it, look!

I think the point is that this is easily separable from money. If tomorrow, going to space became a pedestrian affair, available to all, a sizable chunk of this interested would still want to do it. The impulse isn't as status-driven as you describe it: wanting to see the Earth from space doesnt derive most of its value from being the only one that gets to do it. Compare it to seeing the Grand Canyon. Nobody goes there because they think it's a unique privilege. They pack in amongst the Midwestern tourists because the Grand Canyon is amazing.

Would they really? I bet most people wouldn't want to go into space. A lot of people can now bungee-jump, fly their own planes, fly in a balloon, paraglide, deep dive, yet how many do any of these things.

I've done a handful of these things, and they seem categorically different from being in space: even low Earth orbit _feels_ noticeably different from skydiving etc (I'm also making the assumption that it's safer than eg paragliding). I suppose we're just starting from different assumptions about what captures the imagination of the average person. At the very least, I'd be surprised if the average current spaceflight customer was more driven by status than by excitement about space per se.

> At the very least, I'd be surprised if the average current spaceflight customer was more driven by status than by excitement about space per se.

Absolutely agree with this. There are far better ways of flexing status on Earth than paying for a space trip.

If you asked any given person on the street whether they'd like to see the Earth from space, I'd be willing to wager serious money they'd be more likely to say yes than no, given that it were easily accessible and the money would be taken care of. Those activities you listed have quite a bit of money and time needed to do. But the desires are all absolutely there.

>"men"

Obligatory: "But you're leaving out women's historical involvement!"

"The Women of Fly Tying

OKAY BOYS, GET OVER IT: women have made some of the most important contributions in the fine art of fly tying.

By a Thread: A Retrospective on Women and Fly Tying (The Whitefish Press), by Erin Block, is a celebration of the critical impact women have made on tying flies. Erin includes the work and stories of Dame Juliana Berners, Mary Orvis Marbury, Elizabeth Greig, Winnie Dette, Mary Dette Clark, Elsie Darbee, Helen Shaw, Megan Boyd, and Frances Stearns, along with modern tiers Sharon E. Wright (Sharon is a regular contributor to Fly Tyer magazine), Cathy Beck, and April Vokey.

Do you like a good mystery? Erin solves one by uncovering what ever happened to Sara Jane McBride, the famed fly tier who was also America’s first entomological fly angler.

Erin’s flies have appeared in Fly Tyer magazine, and we will have fuller coverage of her new book in a future issue of our magazine. In the meantime, congratulations to Erin for making such an important contribution to the literature on fly tying!

To buy a copy of By a Thread: A Retrospective on Women and Fly Tying, go to www.whitefishpress.com."

https://www.flytyer.com/women-fly-tying/

Thank you for posting this. The figures, modern and historic, in the book were IIRC entirely men. As a bewildered outsider, I extrapolated from that, but I'm delighted to learn that this sport appeals to a broader audience than is represented in the book :-)

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