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Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics

179 points · 243 comments · viraj_shah

  1. michael1999 · · focus · HN ↗
    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.

    1. ManuelKiessling · · focus · HN ↗
      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.
      1. mahboi · · focus · HN ↗
        With the important difference that the cryptocurrency financial systems are backed by something with limited supply
        1. woadwarrior01 · · focus · HN ↗
          It depends. BTC is, ETH isn't.
        2. makeitdouble · · focus · HN ↗
          Gold wasn't infinite either.
          1. mahboi · · focus · HN ↗
            Yeah, they rug-pulled the dollar. Well also gold conversion was logistically hard.
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