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.
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Aurornis
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.
show comments
buredoranna
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).
show comments
totallynotabird
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 .
show comments
0PingWithJesus
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.
speedgoose
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.
show comments
frays
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.
jszymborski
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].
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.
skybrian
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.
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.
show comments
m101
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.
show comments
jazzpush2
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.
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.
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.
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...
(edit:formatting)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.