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.

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alexgoodhart 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	glitcher 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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p-e-w an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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 an hour 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.