Yet another Hacker News

Burning Man Death Rates – A Short Lesson in Statistics

38 points viraj_shah 1 day ago 18 comments

zeroonetwothree 46 minutes ago | parent

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).

swerner 44 minutes ago | parent

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.

pixl97 36 minutes ago | parent

Not sure about that after it rains. After the last few years the death rate to quicksand may have increased a few billion percent.

bherms 35 minutes ago | parent

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

marssaxman 29 minutes ago | parent

> 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).

alevskaya 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

rottencupcakes 22 minutes ago | parent

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

bsimpson 18 minutes ago | parent

"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.

tcdent 41 minutes ago | parent

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).

swerner 30 minutes ago | parent

This was just one web search away: https://www.aol.com/articles/burning-man-deaths-look-every-1...

tcdent 14 minutes ago | parent

The ambiguity of some of these supports my read btw.

swerner 3 minutes ago | parent

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.

linuxftw 36 minutes ago | parent

> The biggest factor is selection bias.

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

Aurornis 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

p-e-w 18 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

Aurornis 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

speedgoose 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

michael1999 20 minutes ago | parent

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.