Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics (ihavenapkinthoughts.substack.com)

I don't like the people standing on the sidelines saying "Those were obviously useful fences." Ya but most fences suck. If you don't have healthy mechanisms for shedding/fresh slates your system will rot.

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.

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.

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."

Marathons select for people with health, energy etc and put them through a 6+ month cardio training regime. But the 5 hours of a marathon have a greatly elevated rate of cardiac arrest - because the strain of running a marathon more than compensates.

Personally, I'm quite surprised to learn the week-long desert drug orgy with experimental buildings and art vehicles and 70,000 attendees regularly has no deaths.

Deaths due to overdose at music festivals in general are not uncommon and are kept quiet (somehow).

This is, in fact, stated rate at the top.

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.

To declare someone dead you must have the facilities to do so. Burning Man, despite having a pretty advanced medical facility (known as Rampart), does not have the facilities to do so.

Burning Man Organization (BMOrg), Pershing, and Washoe absolutely know how many people die at the event. However, a death, like most deaths in the default world, are not particularly special. To be honest, until 2018 (due to the man running into the fire during man burn), deaths and information about them were fairly private: usually the partners and the deceased's campmates were informed, but news articles and significant publicity were uncommon. There's not a lot of benefit to running around screaming "Some dude died of a heart attack last night at this camp!" People die of heart attacks all the time.

It's the third-largest city in Nevada, although only for a week. There will be some deaths, there are also births. The birth in 2025 was absolutely not the first one, but it was notable because the woman didn't know she was pregnant, and her relative unpreparedness was newsworthy. Other births were planned, delivery was private, and the mother eventually goes to Reno or another hospital to report the birth and get a formal record.

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.

There is a 27% chance that we would observe 3 deaths or less, given an average rate of 4.9 deaths. This is also known as a p-value.5 6Why isn’t our p-value greater? Seems like 27% is quite low. By scientific standards, this isn’t abnormal at all. Observing 3 deaths is completely within reason.

However, the relative uncertainty of our point data is quite large at about 58% (1/sqrt(3)). This is the size of the error. If we were talking about death rates in the thousands, we might have an error of 3% or less. But the reality is that at such low counts, our data is considered quite “fuzzy”.

(I haven't been on over 10 years, but back in the early 2000s there were always rumours about deaths that the organisers managed to ensure ended up categorised as not happening at the event. People who died in ambulances on the way to hospital, or in hospital after injury at the event, or on the road in or out of the event...)

That is somehow a fault of a week long festival?

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.

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?

And you went twice?

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?

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.

Simpsons called it 30 years ago.

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

> 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.

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 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.

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.

With humans at play, you are bound to get sensual experiences, because that is what many people enjoy. You also have people who do epic amounts of work and engineering, because that is also what many people enjoy.

Cant really speak to your experiences with social strife. My burning man camp became my family back in the real world. Some of the smartest and most exceptional people I have ever met. Conservative goat ranchers to bay area they/them environmentalists going out of their way to be kind and give 110%.

I just got a bunch of painstakingly hand made quilts to celebrate the birth of my 2 month old in the mail from a campmate I haven't seen in 3 years.

Even if you’re right, Burning Man strikes me a symptom of a sick and hollow “normal” society.

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.