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."
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.
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.
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.
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.