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.
I wish someone would expand this comment into a full-length study on the evolution of regulations and infrastructure within Burning Man. It's a really interesting topic.
The funny thing is that in spite of reinventing so much of it, the event still feels dangerous and leaves you to make your own decisions.
Burning Man still enables and allows dangerous art that you can fuck up your shit on. The organization has an interesting take on this: they allow dangerous art, so long as it looks as dangerous as it is. They don't want participants to be surprised that something was dangerous, because they want you to be able to do your own reasonable risk assessment.
(Though, I think the really impressive installations are the ones that look/feel more dangerous than they actually are.)
For what it's worth, I think this is a great exercise that should be undertaken now and again: you may not realize the ways in which a system is good or bad until you endeavor to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.
In the case of Burning Man, there's structure that let's people be mostly safe by default, while supporting some reasonable risk taking. In the case of crypto, I think we've seen use cases where there's value in having a means of storing and transferring wealth outside of government control, which we saw the benefits of early on as governments tried to financially wall off groups like Wikileaks.
Does that mean we want all of the safe guards gone? No. Does that necessarily mean society and its structures are perfect and should never change? I think obviously, also no.
This is actually what I was thinking of when I made this comment. I witnessed someone in some position of authority (from either DPW/Artery/someone else clearly sent to check it out) on the first day talking to one of the artists. They were literally watching people climb it and were like "yep, that looks pretty dangerous" and then went on their way.
It felt safe-ish to climb at first, until about halfway up when you could feel it swaying back and forth in the wind. I am usually the "climb dumb shit at Burning Man" type, but had my stomach drop about 3/4 of the way up and had to abort. It was very easy to grip, nothing felt insecure, etc, so it was definitely "safe" if you knew what you were doing. But if you ate it off the top of that, you'd be fucked.
>so it was definitely "safe" if you knew what you were doing.
Those quotation marks doing a lot work...I guess those IBCs are 1m tall? so 8m at the top. A fall from 8m could result in severe injury if not fatality. Fucked indeed...
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.
The post admits this, first in the summary: "However, Burning Man’s near zero death rate over its existence is abnormal, and likely due to selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors".
Then again in the final sentence: "The more likely explanation for the remaining gap is something no demographic slicing can capture. Burning Man selects for healthier people who are willing and able to spend a week in the desert heat, regardless of their age, race, or income bracket."
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.
Article mentions age demographics and "selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors" right at the top.
Oblivious in such a painful? I'm still open to hearing a sound argument to back that up. Your arguments are more dismissive and did not address anything specific in the article you disagreed with.
> 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.
Brent Chapman, author of "Incident Management for DevOps and SRE", just got back from his annual "not exactly a vacation" trip to Burning Man, where he's worked as a "Dispatch Supervisor" since 2012.[1]
I as able to hear him at BayLISA giving his talk on incident command and what we can learn from the fire department[2][3], an excellent talk.
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.
put any large group of people in a spot, and statistically you will have deaths.
I was at a 35k~ officially (though it was realistically 50k) people. And there was three deaths. 1 public suicide, 1 heart attack, and one that the details never got published.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
Even less so in the US with its weird categories that confuse the rest of us: I have never figured out how people with lighter skin then me (mixed white and south Asian) can be "black" or whether Spanish people are "hispanic".
No racism is the (moral) judgement and using different assessments for different 'races'. You can call it ethnicities if you like, but it's not actually going to mean something different.
Depending on the trait you actually care about. If you care about bone geometry, you select some length of a bone, you want to measure. If you care about susceptibility for a certain sickness, you measure that.
It's not racist, because it doesn't say anything about the worth of the human or their rights. In fact, if you refuse to categorize and measure, because you consider this in itself to be evil, you can't actually cater to this specific person.
Great article. I think the author has lots of potential to do other interesting analysis.
Example: Why living near a world-class hospital decreases your expected lifespan. Areas around top specialized medical centers often show higher local mortality because terminally ill or high-risk patients relocate or are transferred there.
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.
It's not discussed in the article. The article discussed, race, sex, etc. and then makes an assertion that it "wouldn't move much from 4.9."
That's completely false when using geolocation. We can estimate from crime stats easily that a tour of the country avoiding the highest murder rate parts of the country would land you very close to a zero murder rate.
Among healthy adults, that's essentially a near zero chance of death.
That isn't surprising. Attending a festival in a desert with little oversight and lots of drugs is obviously more dangerous than buying groceries in white suburbia.
4.9 is simply not the relevant number unless your goal is to try to say that the event is on par with taking a walk in the wrong part of town.
But I'm certain that wasn't the point of the article. It's dishonest, is my point.
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.
> 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).
Based on the org and event's own stated goals, and the reality of what most of the participants get out of it, it's not just about "camping together", it's at least in part about building a temporary city focused around art, expression, and a set of shared principles.
anyway, to the rest of your comment, Burning Man absolutely is a mixed bag, as any dense place with ~65,000 will be, and it sure isn't a place for everyone, but decrying it as "corruption of the soul" and "sodom on earth", seems quite extreme imho
> you’re making them feel unsafe because of some normal thing you did
It might help the discussion to say what that "normal thing" is. Is it truly a normal innocuous thing that is fine to repeat here, or was it say, using slurs or acting in an anti-social, cruel way? the rest of your comment, as well as my lived experience, really makes me believe it was something more akin to the second, even if you don't actively view it that way. I'm happy to be wrong, but maybe reflect on how your vagueness and framing primes that sort of reading?
I’ll answer here as others asking. It wasn’t me. Basically a friend (a girl) went into someone’s tent (an ex of theirs, a guy) whilst their ex was alone in there. They spent the night together. Seems normal right.. however, that person (the girl) got chucked out of camp because they made the person feel “unsafe” having not asked permission to enter the tent before entering the tent, like at the door or something. Obviously a normal person would assume permission after having spent a night together cuddling, but the (male) person chose to weaponise it the next day, and the camp’s liberal mind virus spread like wildfire thereafter.
> the camp’s liberal mind virus spread like wildfire thereafter.
I guess I'm still just confused about this. Can you connect the dots between liberal values and how this situation played out?
in general: "liberal mind virus" is imho, a useless phrase at best, and an actively conversation-deteriorating one generally. Other people _do_ have legitimately held belief systems and assumptions that don't match yours, and arrive at them through a complex chain of events. It feels to me as if you are acting out the same derision you claim "hyper-liberals" show to their perceived outgroup by dismissing it as a "mind virus", removing them from the category of "normal person" so your assumption can hold
> I would describe it as literally sodom on earth.
1. You should go to Ozora festival in hungary. Then you will experience true hedonism.
2. Most of what you describe can be broken into normal human group behaviour, and american legal warfare at work.
Burn style festival are really cool and fun. But it really is about what you bring to it. Some people want a place where they can be the worst versions of themselves around strangers where it won't follow them home. Others truely want to create something cool.
It really sounds like you don't have the right attitude for these kind of festivals, and should stick to commercial "edm" festivals.
> 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.
I agree that is a trait of the hyper liberal, but it belongs to hyper conservative people too. Also, given your feelings, why did you go a second time?
It sounds like there was a personality conflict or something in the specific camp you went with? Some of the issues you describe are totally foreign to my experience and don’t seem descriptions of the event as a whole.
The only lawyer language I can remember was the warning on the ticket that I might die. I don’t think I ever encountered any contracts or similar.
It’s quite difficult to comment on someone’s camp turning on them with no context. Badly run camps exist and badly behaved people exist too. You can’t expect the org (or a higher power) to police this.
> There’s a focus on the environment yet everything is disposable and people travel from all over the world to go.
There's a focus on LNT, not vague environmentalism. It is not materially worse than flying to another country in terms of environmental impact.
> 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.
Oh boy, I can only imagine what sort of personality you are to have gone through this. I've seen this archetype before.
That said: Burning Man is a platform/blank slate that people bring things to. There are many camps with different ethos. Personally, I think the best way to burn is to get a group of friends and do a thing together.
Just dropping into a camp of people you don't know is bound to have the potential for complicated interpersonal dynamics, particularly in one of the harsher environments on the planet. Everything there is more difficult, and that extends to relationships.
> 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).
This is a choice. If you're part of a 200+ person theme camp, yes, you're opting into some bureaucracy needed to make sure the requisite cats get herded and the mission of that camp happens. Grab three friends to do your own thing and you can live blissfully paperwork free, if you so choose. Camps are not a one-size-fits-all model.
This is like joining a FAANG and then complaining about layers of management. Don't like it? Startups are callin'. Or even something in-between.
> 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.
Doing literally anything in that environment is hard, so mediocrity is sort of par for the course. That said, the best hot dog I've ever had was in many ways the shittiest hot dog. But it appeared out in deep playa when I was tired and starving and far from camp, and felt like a small miracle. It teaches you to appreciate the simple things and the kindness of strangers, if you let it.
> Obviously most of it is all about seeing and being seen, engaging in the pleasures of sensual experiences on offer.
I'm not sure how you managed to make it out there twice and come away thinking that this is the point. I feel like if you spent fifteen minutes reading about the burn, you'd immediately dispel yourself of this.
> The best thing about it imo is the cycling around where you can mostly just get away from the degeneracy that exists.
Reading between the lines at your conservatism, I can't really help but wonder what you thought you were going to get out of a counter-culture event that emphasizes freedom of expression. You didn't think us queerdos were going to be up in that shit makin' you uncomfortable, or telling you not to creep on your campmates? And then you did it TWICE? Big oofs.
The most surprising thing is that you went back a second time after getting kicked out of camp and turned against by all of your friends.
I’ve known a couple of people who were turned against by their friends much to their surprise, and in their case was definitely the liberal mind virus and not their own behavior too.
> I would describe it as literally sodom on earth.
This would be extremely disturbing given the extreme extent to which people rely on the hospitality of others, as I understand it. I hope you mean it in a sense of indulgent degeneracy rather than in the biblical sense.
It is a 60000 people festival where OP came with friends he knows for years (by own words).
It says something about OP and his friends, but it is unclear who was actually in the wrong. We have no idea whether the "other" people were in the wrong or someone actually crossed lines and "others" reacted reasonably. Because people who, for example, abuse or mistreat others see themselves as victims when it is not enabled.
But, what is sure is that if your friends turn on you during short crowded festival, the issue is in your group dynamic. And way OP uses language suggest the kind of personality that will blame strategically rather then fairly
From everything i've seen it seems to have the opposite tone and ethos as biblical sodom & gomorrah—it's oriented around welcoming strangers and not abusing them. Even being kicked out would be preferable.
I’ve worked gate for years, so I’ve seen plenty of RVs and camper trailers from the inside, and you do get an impression of the people that travel in them. Everyone’s there - be it tie die and patchouli hippies, be it hunting gear and MRE preppers, college party kids or mom and pop coming because it was on some travel destination list.
Camp with hippies, and you’ll be at a hippie festival. Camp with ravers, you’ll be at a rave. You can camp with a church group there, with philosophers (we had them as neighbors one year), with families with small kids, or with (disarmed) 2A gun nuts.
I would never guessed someone would look at these kind of events and thought that they would be frequented by different people (like conservatives). When I went to Christian retreats, I knew that most people there would be hardcore conservatives
Burning man is an event for typical Silicon Valley folks to find community. The event is so lame because the people are - they spent their formative years following a preconceived plan laid out for them by their parents, instead of pursuing hobbies they're passionate about. Now they're playing catchup, and it comes off contrived and corny. (Not everyone is this way, of course, but by now the majority are, and so I'm painting with broad strokes).
Most of the advertised experiences here come naturally as parts of passion-formed communities.
The down side is that it really isn't really possible to break into such communities in a meaningful way without having already done them for years before you've turned ~18-20yo.
Whether it's team sports, rock climbing, surfing, music, etc. You can start [skateboarding] at age 25, but you'll never be a real [skater], or have the experiences that came along with spending the formative years of your life dedicated to it. Replace [skateboarding]/[skater] with your hobby of choice.
> t really isn't really possible to break into such communities in a meaningful way without having already done them for years before you've turned ~18-20yo.
I dont think you know much about rock climbimg culture or music that is out there.
What you say is kinda true for classical music, where exactly you need to go through formal schools from early. But that is literally the parents driven start.
Should people who missed out on formative life experiences all simply accept this? Decide they don’t deserve spiritual nourishment and trudge on with their mediocre lives? Self-actualize in a way you personally would find less cringe? We all get one spin, man.
Even if you’re right, Burning Man strikes me a symptom of a sick and hollow “normal” society.
If you’re 25 you can get good at anything in 10 years. I play hockey with lots of guys that started in their 20s and they play just as well as the rest of us now(40s)
Eh, I've been mountain biking seriously for 15 years, and there's kids in their teens running circles around me because their free time, risk tolerance, and brain development just means they win.
At some point 10+ years of adult development will get you pretty good at something, but being competitive beyond say a high-school varsity level with a late start is very difficult.
I think he was talking about playing hockey with guys, having good time and not being drag on other guys who started as kids ... but now have hockey as a hobby.
And then you are part of that community just like any other guy.
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.
I wish someone would expand this comment into a full-length study on the evolution of regulations and infrastructure within Burning Man. It's a really interesting topic.
Yeah that would be a really interesting read, either as an article or full length book
I would read that book
Looks like Burning Man started as docker service running on my machine, it's been growing since then ... I'm also curious about this!
Kinda insane they needed a death to reinvent streets imho.
"Regulations are written in blood."
Were
Still are, as we can see.
Yes, but I can have civilization at home.
This reminds me of Crypto bros reinventing the financial system, slowly, with lots and lots of innocent (and some not so innocent) victims on the way.
The funny thing is that in spite of reinventing so much of it, the event still feels dangerous and leaves you to make your own decisions.
Burning Man still enables and allows dangerous art that you can fuck up your shit on. The organization has an interesting take on this: they allow dangerous art, so long as it looks as dangerous as it is. They don't want participants to be surprised that something was dangerous, because they want you to be able to do your own reasonable risk assessment.
(Though, I think the really impressive installations are the ones that look/feel more dangerous than they actually are.)
For what it's worth, I think this is a great exercise that should be undertaken now and again: you may not realize the ways in which a system is good or bad until you endeavor to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.
In the case of Burning Man, there's structure that let's people be mostly safe by default, while supporting some reasonable risk taking. In the case of crypto, I think we've seen use cases where there's value in having a means of storing and transferring wealth outside of government control, which we saw the benefits of early on as governments tried to financially wall off groups like Wikileaks.
Does that mean we want all of the safe guards gone? No. Does that necessarily mean society and its structures are perfect and should never change? I think obviously, also no.
> dangerous art that you can fuck up your shit on.
Can you give some examples?
In 2023 there was a giant cube made out of IBC water tanks. You can see a video here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FTwpt0OuW_U
This is actually what I was thinking of when I made this comment. I witnessed someone in some position of authority (from either DPW/Artery/someone else clearly sent to check it out) on the first day talking to one of the artists. They were literally watching people climb it and were like "yep, that looks pretty dangerous" and then went on their way.
It felt safe-ish to climb at first, until about halfway up when you could feel it swaying back and forth in the wind. I am usually the "climb dumb shit at Burning Man" type, but had my stomach drop about 3/4 of the way up and had to abort. It was very easy to grip, nothing felt insecure, etc, so it was definitely "safe" if you knew what you were doing. But if you ate it off the top of that, you'd be fucked.
>so it was definitely "safe" if you knew what you were doing.
Those quotation marks doing a lot work...I guess those IBCs are 1m tall? so 8m at the top. A fall from 8m could result in severe injury if not fatality. Fucked indeed...
https://pdf.journalagent.com/travma/pdfs/UTD_19_6_529_535.pd...
Never been, but the titular burning man installation comes to mind.
With the important difference that the cryptocurrency financial systems are backed by something with limited supply
It depends. BTC is, ETH isn't.
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.
The post admits this, first in the summary: "However, Burning Man’s near zero death rate over its existence is abnormal, and likely due to selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors".
Then again in the final sentence: "The more likely explanation for the remaining gap is something no demographic slicing can capture. Burning Man selects for healthier people who are willing and able to spend a week in the desert heat, regardless of their age, race, or income bracket."
so the comparison is pointless by their own admission
It's not pointless to figure some things out just because you can't figure everything out.
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.
Inane work, op.
Article mentions age demographics and "selection bias of healthier attendees and other confounding demographic factors" right at the top.
Oblivious in such a painful? I'm still open to hearing a sound argument to back that up. Your arguments are more dismissive and did not address anything specific in the article you disagreed with.
Did you bother to read the article? This is covered.
> 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 kinds of drugs people at burning man prefer to take are not very likely to lead to death from overdose.
Brent Chapman, author of "Incident Management for DevOps and SRE", just got back from his annual "not exactly a vacation" trip to Burning Man, where he's worked as a "Dispatch Supervisor" since 2012.[1]
I as able to hear him at BayLISA giving his talk on incident command and what we can learn from the fire department[2][3], an excellent talk.
[1] https://greatcircle.com/blog/2026/09/29/burning-man-incident...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn8-R6Pt9hY
[3] https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon18americas/presentat...
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Fascinating! Thank you for the links.
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]
[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
"Safety third" is a mantra out there.
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.
you could just do a lot of reckless things at home with just a ladder. Heck, come to my home, I'll put couches in the trees for your.
> The other fell from an installation.
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.
Not sure about that after it rains. After the last few years the death rate to quicksand may have increased a few billion percent.
put any large group of people in a spot, and statistically you will have deaths.
I was at a 35k~ officially (though it was realistically 50k) people. And there was three deaths. 1 public suicide, 1 heart attack, and one that the details never got published.
> The biggest factor is selection bias.
This is, in fact, stated rate at the top.
There might not be data to support it since it touches on legally sensitive subjects, but the deaths are almost entirely attributed to drug use.
Deaths due to overdose at music festivals in general are not uncommon and are kept quiet (somehow).
This was just one web search away: https://www.aol.com/articles/burning-man-deaths-look-every-1...
The ambiguity of some of these supports my read btw.
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.
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 .
They included someone who died on the way to Reno hospital this year.
Like Disney World
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.
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.
No racial categories map well on to genetics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
Even less so in the US with its weird categories that confuse the rest of us: I have never figured out how people with lighter skin then me (mixed white and south Asian) can be "black" or whether Spanish people are "hispanic".
Races are just racist.
No racism is the (moral) judgement and using different assessments for different 'races'. You can call it ethnicities if you like, but it's not actually going to mean something different.
How do you define a race without being racist?
Depending on the trait you actually care about. If you care about bone geometry, you select some length of a bone, you want to measure. If you care about susceptibility for a certain sickness, you measure that.
It's not racist, because it doesn't say anything about the worth of the human or their rights. In fact, if you refuse to categorize and measure, because you consider this in itself to be evil, you can't actually cater to this specific person.
I guess that categorising humans based on the length of some bones isn’t racist yes.
But I’m afraid that in practice, races aren’t biologically defined.
Great article. I think the author has lots of potential to do other interesting analysis.
Example: Why living near a world-class hospital decreases your expected lifespan. Areas around top specialized medical centers often show higher local mortality because terminally ill or high-risk patients relocate or are transferred there.
I believe this is why it's important to report metrics like Excess Mortality/Deaths rather than just Deaths when doing this sort of analysis [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality
A FAANG founder nearly broke his neck at Burning Man when he started doing giants on a Russian swing with no idea how to get off of it.
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.
Another factor not mentioned in the post is the EMS service at Burning Man is highly coordinated and prepared: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/f52w3PrHMXU
The 4.9 standardized includes deaths from extremely violent, poverty stricken parts of the country,
You need to exclude those areas to lower that number before comparing.
Imagine a tour of the US that includes the more dangerous parts of Oakland, Memphis, and the like.
Most people wouldn't book that tour, so the base line risk factor you're using isn't relevant for most people.
This is discussed in the article.
It's not discussed in the article. The article discussed, race, sex, etc. and then makes an assertion that it "wouldn't move much from 4.9."
That's completely false when using geolocation. We can estimate from crime stats easily that a tour of the country avoiding the highest murder rate parts of the country would land you very close to a zero murder rate.
Among healthy adults, that's essentially a near zero chance of death.
That isn't surprising. Attending a festival in a desert with little oversight and lots of drugs is obviously more dangerous than buying groceries in white suburbia.
4.9 is simply not the relevant number unless your goal is to try to say that the event is on par with taking a walk in the wrong part of town.
But I'm certain that wasn't the point of the article. It's dishonest, is my point.
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.
> 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).
Based on the org and event's own stated goals, and the reality of what most of the participants get out of it, it's not just about "camping together", it's at least in part about building a temporary city focused around art, expression, and a set of shared principles.
anyway, to the rest of your comment, Burning Man absolutely is a mixed bag, as any dense place with ~65,000 will be, and it sure isn't a place for everyone, but decrying it as "corruption of the soul" and "sodom on earth", seems quite extreme imho
> you’re making them feel unsafe because of some normal thing you did
It might help the discussion to say what that "normal thing" is. Is it truly a normal innocuous thing that is fine to repeat here, or was it say, using slurs or acting in an anti-social, cruel way? the rest of your comment, as well as my lived experience, really makes me believe it was something more akin to the second, even if you don't actively view it that way. I'm happy to be wrong, but maybe reflect on how your vagueness and framing primes that sort of reading?
> degeneracy… literally sodom on earth
> like a public lynching
> all hyper liberal... the types that cannot help but judge individuals based on whether they’re in their group on not
I'm starting to wonder what "some normal thing you did" entailed.
I’ll answer here as others asking. It wasn’t me. Basically a friend (a girl) went into someone’s tent (an ex of theirs, a guy) whilst their ex was alone in there. They spent the night together. Seems normal right.. however, that person (the girl) got chucked out of camp because they made the person feel “unsafe” having not asked permission to enter the tent before entering the tent, like at the door or something. Obviously a normal person would assume permission after having spent a night together cuddling, but the (male) person chose to weaponise it the next day, and the camp’s liberal mind virus spread like wildfire thereafter.
> the camp’s liberal mind virus spread like wildfire thereafter.
I guess I'm still just confused about this. Can you connect the dots between liberal values and how this situation played out?
in general: "liberal mind virus" is imho, a useless phrase at best, and an actively conversation-deteriorating one generally. Other people _do_ have legitimately held belief systems and assumptions that don't match yours, and arrive at them through a complex chain of events. It feels to me as if you are acting out the same derision you claim "hyper-liberals" show to their perceived outgroup by dismissing it as a "mind virus", removing them from the category of "normal person" so your assumption can hold
> I would describe it as literally sodom on earth.
1. You should go to Ozora festival in hungary. Then you will experience true hedonism. 2. Most of what you describe can be broken into normal human group behaviour, and american legal warfare at work.
Burn style festival are really cool and fun. But it really is about what you bring to it. Some people want a place where they can be the worst versions of themselves around strangers where it won't follow them home. Others truely want to create something cool.
It really sounds like you don't have the right attitude for these kind of festivals, and should stick to commercial "edm" festivals.
> 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.
I agree that is a trait of the hyper liberal, but it belongs to hyper conservative people too. Also, given your feelings, why did you go a second time?
It sounds like there was a personality conflict or something in the specific camp you went with? Some of the issues you describe are totally foreign to my experience and don’t seem descriptions of the event as a whole.
The only lawyer language I can remember was the warning on the ticket that I might die. I don’t think I ever encountered any contracts or similar.
It’s quite difficult to comment on someone’s camp turning on them with no context. Badly run camps exist and badly behaved people exist too. You can’t expect the org (or a higher power) to police this.
a good hint is someone whining about the woke mind virus at an event that is 60/40 dem/repub with a median age of 45 by census
See my other comment
> There’s a focus on the environment yet everything is disposable and people travel from all over the world to go.
There's a focus on LNT, not vague environmentalism. It is not materially worse than flying to another country in terms of environmental impact.
> 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.
Oh boy, I can only imagine what sort of personality you are to have gone through this. I've seen this archetype before.
That said: Burning Man is a platform/blank slate that people bring things to. There are many camps with different ethos. Personally, I think the best way to burn is to get a group of friends and do a thing together.
Just dropping into a camp of people you don't know is bound to have the potential for complicated interpersonal dynamics, particularly in one of the harsher environments on the planet. Everything there is more difficult, and that extends to relationships.
> 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).
This is a choice. If you're part of a 200+ person theme camp, yes, you're opting into some bureaucracy needed to make sure the requisite cats get herded and the mission of that camp happens. Grab three friends to do your own thing and you can live blissfully paperwork free, if you so choose. Camps are not a one-size-fits-all model.
This is like joining a FAANG and then complaining about layers of management. Don't like it? Startups are callin'. Or even something in-between.
> 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.
Doing literally anything in that environment is hard, so mediocrity is sort of par for the course. That said, the best hot dog I've ever had was in many ways the shittiest hot dog. But it appeared out in deep playa when I was tired and starving and far from camp, and felt like a small miracle. It teaches you to appreciate the simple things and the kindness of strangers, if you let it.
> Obviously most of it is all about seeing and being seen, engaging in the pleasures of sensual experiences on offer.
I'm not sure how you managed to make it out there twice and come away thinking that this is the point. I feel like if you spent fifteen minutes reading about the burn, you'd immediately dispel yourself of this.
> The best thing about it imo is the cycling around where you can mostly just get away from the degeneracy that exists.
Reading between the lines at your conservatism, I can't really help but wonder what you thought you were going to get out of a counter-culture event that emphasizes freedom of expression. You didn't think us queerdos were going to be up in that shit makin' you uncomfortable, or telling you not to creep on your campmates? And then you did it TWICE? Big oofs.
The most surprising thing is that you went back a second time after getting kicked out of camp and turned against by all of your friends.
I’ve known a couple of people who were turned against by their friends much to their surprise, and in their case was definitely the liberal mind virus and not their own behavior too.
The above is only true if you reinterpret what the poster said.
Hey, we're just tryin' to have a good time, narc. Why do you want to destroy us? Don't commit your hate crimes here! Hate crime!
Simpsons called it 30 years ago.
> I would describe it as literally sodom on earth.
This would be extremely disturbing given the extreme extent to which people rely on the hospitality of others, as I understand it. I hope you mean it in a sense of indulgent degeneracy rather than in the biblical sense.
> People you called your friends for years will turn against you once the group turns on you.
That is somehow a fault of a week long festival?
It could certainly illustrate the group mentalities fostered there
It is a 60000 people festival where OP came with friends he knows for years (by own words).
It says something about OP and his friends, but it is unclear who was actually in the wrong. We have no idea whether the "other" people were in the wrong or someone actually crossed lines and "others" reacted reasonably. Because people who, for example, abuse or mistreat others see themselves as victims when it is not enabled.
But, what is sure is that if your friends turn on you during short crowded festival, the issue is in your group dynamic. And way OP uses language suggest the kind of personality that will blame strategically rather then fairly
From everything i've seen it seems to have the opposite tone and ethos as biblical sodom & gomorrah—it's oriented around welcoming strangers and not abusing them. Even being kicked out would be preferable.
I think it was intended to illustrate the kind of people who frequent the festival.
If the festival turns against you and you want to argue they're wrong, fine.
If the festival AND your friends turn against you, maybe you were being a dick and you're not telling us the whole story.
It’s what seven days of sleep deprivation, dehydration and probably substance abuse do to you.
Lmao at hyper liberal. It’s libertarian at best. I met so many conservatives when I went, I was shocked.
Yeah that description made me laugh too. It is by no means a hippie love-fest, almost the opposite sometimes.
I’ve worked gate for years, so I’ve seen plenty of RVs and camper trailers from the inside, and you do get an impression of the people that travel in them. Everyone’s there - be it tie die and patchouli hippies, be it hunting gear and MRE preppers, college party kids or mom and pop coming because it was on some travel destination list.
Camp with hippies, and you’ll be at a hippie festival. Camp with ravers, you’ll be at a rave. You can camp with a church group there, with philosophers (we had them as neighbors one year), with families with small kids, or with (disarmed) 2A gun nuts.
>The people are all hyper liberal
I would never guessed someone would look at these kind of events and thought that they would be frequented by different people (like conservatives). When I went to Christian retreats, I knew that most people there would be hardcore conservatives
“Sodom on earth”? Really?
And you went twice?
Burning man is an event for typical Silicon Valley folks to find community. The event is so lame because the people are - they spent their formative years following a preconceived plan laid out for them by their parents, instead of pursuing hobbies they're passionate about. Now they're playing catchup, and it comes off contrived and corny. (Not everyone is this way, of course, but by now the majority are, and so I'm painting with broad strokes).
Most of the advertised experiences here come naturally as parts of passion-formed communities.
The down side is that it really isn't really possible to break into such communities in a meaningful way without having already done them for years before you've turned ~18-20yo.
Whether it's team sports, rock climbing, surfing, music, etc. You can start [skateboarding] at age 25, but you'll never be a real [skater], or have the experiences that came along with spending the formative years of your life dedicated to it. Replace [skateboarding]/[skater] with your hobby of choice.
The top city of origin for Burning Man attendees is Reno.
> t really isn't really possible to break into such communities in a meaningful way without having already done them for years before you've turned ~18-20yo.
I dont think you know much about rock climbimg culture or music that is out there.
What you say is kinda true for classical music, where exactly you need to go through formal schools from early. But that is literally the parents driven start.
Should people who missed out on formative life experiences all simply accept this? Decide they don’t deserve spiritual nourishment and trudge on with their mediocre lives? Self-actualize in a way you personally would find less cringe? We all get one spin, man.
Even if you’re right, Burning Man strikes me a symptom of a sick and hollow “normal” society.
If you’re 25 you can get good at anything in 10 years. I play hockey with lots of guys that started in their 20s and they play just as well as the rest of us now(40s)
Eh, I've been mountain biking seriously for 15 years, and there's kids in their teens running circles around me because their free time, risk tolerance, and brain development just means they win.
At some point 10+ years of adult development will get you pretty good at something, but being competitive beyond say a high-school varsity level with a late start is very difficult.
I think he was talking about playing hockey with guys, having good time and not being drag on other guys who started as kids ... but now have hockey as a hobby.
And then you are part of that community just like any other guy.
He was not talking about joinikg NHL.