Some of this is selection bias, but lots of this is active work by the organizers.
Burning Man has slowly re-created the regulatory state in response to the standard pressures of civilization. To their credit, this has often been in response to near-misses, but sometimes in response to fatalities. It started with sanitation (potties), and banning guns/explosives. You can have 100 people shooting guns at a party in the desert without sanitation and muddle through. At 10k, you are building a cholera-mad-max experiment. A car running over a sleeping person prompted a designated road network. And then they adopted zoning, with hush-ville and the large sound installation ends. All supported by the ranger team preventing injury every day. Civilization is work.
Been twice to burning man. It’s hard to describe the corruption of the soul that exists at burning man.
There’s a focus on the environment yet everything is disposable and people travel from all over the world to go.
There’s talk of safety but then they will literally kick you out of camp as soon as someone says you’re making them feel unsafe because of some normal thing you did. YES, it did literally happen to someone I know. It felt like a public lynching.
It’s supposed to be camping together but then there’s pages of rules, documents, charity companies, and letters written by lawyers (yes, still the above).
It’s a celebration in mediocrity. Most things that happen are very mediocre at best. They just do it because you’re supposed to give something, so they give something mediocre.
The people are all hyper liberal, and the types that cannot help but judge individuals based on whether they’re in their group on not. People you called your friends for years will turn against you once the group turns on you.
Obviously most of it is all about seeing and being seen, engaging in the pleasures of sensual experiences on offer.
I would describe it as literally sodom on earth. It’s shaped like a butthole, and takes a massive shit once a year.
The best thing about it imo is the cycling around where you can mostly just get away from the degeneracy that exists. The temple is quite nice too.
One point that I haven't seen mentioned here is that deaths that happen outside of the event boundaries are not "counted." For example, if someone is medevac'ed and dies en route or in a Reno hospital, the event organizers don't include that fatality in their count. There may be a distinction as to who is legally allowed to declare someone dead, and whether that can occur on-playa. Road fatalities of participants on their way to and from the event are also not counted .
Every calculated rate depends on what you put in the denominator, so it's a good idea to pay attention to denominators. Trying out different denominators can be helpful for putting a number into different perspectives.
Looking at population-level statistics, even adjusted for age, is useless. Going to burning man requires a level of health, energy, free time (not dealing with health issues), and freedom from chronic illnesses that make traveling to a desert a bad idea.
Most people at high risk of random death are filtered out before they arrive.
There are so many better comparisons that could have been chosen. Comparing Burning Man to outdoor music festivals would be so much more accurate.
Yeah this article is oblivious in such a painful way. The author should really consider their relationship with statistics, which they seem to think govern the world rather than are an abstract extraction from it.
Burning Man has a hugely skewed age demographic, one that has a significant share of deaths due to car+other accidents, suicide, overdose, homicide, and cancer. Like nearly 7/10 chance of dying from once of those.
Beside cancer those are all strongly linked to poverty, and cancer death in younger adulthood may be linked to poverty.
The place certainly has extremes but it’s also a destination where people go with groups and have basically a nanny state watching them.
> Comparing Burning Man to outdoor music festivals would be so much more accurate.
It probably wouldn’t be very interesting though, since those are too similar. One or two deaths over a three-day festival with some tens of thousands of people attending is completely normal even in highly regulated environments like the German mega-festivals.
The similarity is precisely what would make it an interesting comparator.
I don't have time to research this fully, but the first few papers that popped up showed that a lot of the casualty events from music festivals are due to incidents like mass stampedes or even motor vehicles, which I suspect would be much lower at Burning Man. On the other hand, deaths from drug overdose or "structural collapse" are probably higher at Burning Man.
Comparing like-for-like, or as close as you can get, is what enables these interesting comparisons. Pointing out that you're less likely to die of cancer or car crashes while attending burning is not helpful when you compare against population level statistics.
The biggest factor is selection bias. If you are in the hospital with some terrible medical condition you aren’t going to Burning Man.
It would be interesting to look at cause of death at Burning Man, I would expect it to differ significantly from the population overall (even accounting for age).
Given that firearms are prohibited and motor vehicle traffic is limited to 5mph, that alone would take out two unnatural causes of death. Also, drowning is a lot less likely to occur in the desert.
This year of the 3 deaths, 1 was just a heart attack in someone around 60 yrs old (a ranger who was working, so not drug related most likely). The other fell from an installation. Some of these are literally just scaffolding with a couch on top or something - I climbed one and was terrified and even said "wow, I will be surprised if someone doesn't fall off this intoxicated at night".
Some people see that as a feature though - they want the danger and lack of regulation and safety. It's part of why they attend I guess.
note: it was my first time - i'm not a "burner", just wanted to finally see what all the hype was about
It's good to give any sort of thing you're going to climb at the burn a bit of a once over and think about failure modes and worst cases before going on.
In 2018 there was a tower of cars on a spike. [1][2]
One of the cars bent in half (turns out cars aren't design to be supported by a stake in the middle but instead on their two axles. Who would have guessed).
Climbing was closed for the rest of the week.
In 2016 there was a giant boar you could climb on that swiveled at the base and head. There were rumors going around of severed fingers. Surprisingly (or not) it was welded stationary mid-week. [3][4]
It's a reaction from people who feel overly cottled by the world of building permits and safety regulations - who want to be able to just make stuff and let people be responsible for their own choices.
Back to the Future creator Bob Gale also created Interstate 60. I remember it being one of the best movies you wouldn't have otherwise heard of; no idea if it holds up 20y later. One of the themes was that of the frontier - an escape valve for people who don't feel comfortable conforming to regular society. There's a big element of that at Burning Man.
I'd like to know more about that incident, if you have any information. So far as I'm aware, it's the first time someone has died after falling off a structure at Burning Man (though plenty of people have been injured, of course).
It is definitely not the first time. Years ago while doing a ranger shift my friend witnessed a young person fall to their death while climbing a structure. I remember another incident of someone jumping off a dome while psychotic that I suspect was fatal. You need to be sober and capable to climb sketchy stuff.
Really? My takeaway is “there’s a reason we keep motor vehicles out of pedestrian zones”. A surprisingly high number of vehicle related incidents for a 5mph zone.
In my opinion, you should put in your AGENTS.md to use ethnicities and not human races.
Because human races sucks, scientifically.
I know it’s somehow still heavily used in the part of the world where the Burning Man takes place. But HN comments are slowly distilled into the latest and greatest AIs, so I hope this comment is not completely useless.
What you really want with a categorization scheme is to reduce variance. You ask, "how much variance reduction do I see using this categorization scheme?" This could be expressed as a percentage of total variance, like "U.S. Census 5-races captures 27% of variance".
Race is real. U.S. race categories are not the same as used elsewhere in the world. U.S. Census categories map quite well to genetics. They capture a lot of variance. Ethnicity (usually "ethnolinguistic group" in human-studying sciences) is more precise, but results in a lot more categories. You can capture all the variance with infinite categories. This is the bias-variance tradeoff. This is how things are.
I'm not sure what the point of this article is, the author claims 3 deaths at Burning Man is not unexpected because the age-adjusted mean death rate in the US predicts that you'd expect 4.9 deaths. But at no point in the history of Burning Man has there ever been that many deaths, the article itself states that 3 deaths is the most at any Burning Man so far. So 4.9 deaths is not even close to actual average death rate expected for a "mean" Burning Man. And since the prediction of 4.9 deaths on average is wrong, any conclusion based upon that 4.9 deaths expectation is poorly founded. The author just seems to ignore that their model does not match the data at all. It's like if I used how many hot-dogs are in my fridge to model the Burning Man death rate, then at no point acknowledged that these two variables have no connection, either real or spurious, to each other. This is just mystifying to me.
Burning Man has slowly re-created the regulatory state in response to the standard pressures of civilization. To their credit, this has often been in response to near-misses, but sometimes in response to fatalities. It started with sanitation (potties), and banning guns/explosives. You can have 100 people shooting guns at a party in the desert without sanitation and muddle through. At 10k, you are building a cholera-mad-max experiment. A car running over a sleeping person prompted a designated road network. And then they adopted zoning, with hush-ville and the large sound installation ends. All supported by the ranger team preventing injury every day. Civilization is work.
There’s a focus on the environment yet everything is disposable and people travel from all over the world to go.
There’s talk of safety but then they will literally kick you out of camp as soon as someone says you’re making them feel unsafe because of some normal thing you did. YES, it did literally happen to someone I know. It felt like a public lynching.
It’s supposed to be camping together but then there’s pages of rules, documents, charity companies, and letters written by lawyers (yes, still the above).
It’s a celebration in mediocrity. Most things that happen are very mediocre at best. They just do it because you’re supposed to give something, so they give something mediocre.
The people are all hyper liberal, and the types that cannot help but judge individuals based on whether they’re in their group on not. People you called your friends for years will turn against you once the group turns on you.
Obviously most of it is all about seeing and being seen, engaging in the pleasures of sensual experiences on offer.
I would describe it as literally sodom on earth. It’s shaped like a butthole, and takes a massive shit once a year.
The best thing about it imo is the cycling around where you can mostly just get away from the degeneracy that exists. The temple is quite nice too.
That is somehow a fault of a week long festival?
Most people at high risk of random death are filtered out before they arrive.
There are so many better comparisons that could have been chosen. Comparing Burning Man to outdoor music festivals would be so much more accurate.
Burning Man has a hugely skewed age demographic, one that has a significant share of deaths due to car+other accidents, suicide, overdose, homicide, and cancer. Like nearly 7/10 chance of dying from once of those.
Beside cancer those are all strongly linked to poverty, and cancer death in younger adulthood may be linked to poverty.
The place certainly has extremes but it’s also a destination where people go with groups and have basically a nanny state watching them.
Inane work, op.
It probably wouldn’t be very interesting though, since those are too similar. One or two deaths over a three-day festival with some tens of thousands of people attending is completely normal even in highly regulated environments like the German mega-festivals.
I don't have time to research this fully, but the first few papers that popped up showed that a lot of the casualty events from music festivals are due to incidents like mass stampedes or even motor vehicles, which I suspect would be much lower at Burning Man. On the other hand, deaths from drug overdose or "structural collapse" are probably higher at Burning Man.
Comparing like-for-like, or as close as you can get, is what enables these interesting comparisons. Pointing out that you're less likely to die of cancer or car crashes while attending burning is not helpful when you compare against population level statistics.
It would be interesting to look at cause of death at Burning Man, I would expect it to differ significantly from the population overall (even accounting for age).
Some people see that as a feature though - they want the danger and lack of regulation and safety. It's part of why they attend I guess.
note: it was my first time - i'm not a "burner", just wanted to finally see what all the hype was about
In 2018 there was a tower of cars on a spike. [1][2]
One of the cars bent in half (turns out cars aren't design to be supported by a stake in the middle but instead on their two axles. Who would have guessed).
Climbing was closed for the rest of the week.
In 2016 there was a giant boar you could climb on that swiveled at the base and head. There were rumors going around of severed fingers. Surprisingly (or not) it was welded stationary mid-week. [3][4]
[1] https://www.rgj.com/story/life/arts/burning-man/2018/08/29/b...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/comments/9crpce/night_at...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/comments/51d1t5/comment/...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4l-eAJT1Cg
It's a reaction from people who feel overly cottled by the world of building permits and safety regulations - who want to be able to just make stuff and let people be responsible for their own choices.
Back to the Future creator Bob Gale also created Interstate 60. I remember it being one of the best movies you wouldn't have otherwise heard of; no idea if it holds up 20y later. One of the themes was that of the frontier - an escape valve for people who don't feel comfortable conforming to regular society. There's a big element of that at Burning Man.
I'd like to know more about that incident, if you have any information. So far as I'm aware, it's the first time someone has died after falling off a structure at Burning Man (though plenty of people have been injured, of course).
This is, in fact, stated rate at the top.
Deaths due to overdose at music festivals in general are not uncommon and are kept quiet (somehow).
Because human races sucks, scientifically.
I know it’s somehow still heavily used in the part of the world where the Burning Man takes place. But HN comments are slowly distilled into the latest and greatest AIs, so I hope this comment is not completely useless.
Race is real. U.S. race categories are not the same as used elsewhere in the world. U.S. Census categories map quite well to genetics. They capture a lot of variance. Ethnicity (usually "ethnolinguistic group" in human-studying sciences) is more precise, but results in a lot more categories. You can capture all the variance with infinite categories. This is the bias-variance tradeoff. This is how things are.