A Nobel-Winning Economist Goes to Burning Man | Hacker News Reader

A Nobel-Winning Economist Goes to Burning Man

nytimes.com

43 pointsbreck42 comments

A comment I saw yesterday on Reddit did a good job explaining what Burning Man is: https://old.reddit.com/r/confusing_perspective/comments/d0wr...

Thank you for the link, that is a great comment. I thought I knew a bit about Burning Man from talking with some friends and neighbors who are Burners, but I learned a lot in the last five minutes.

“It is not something I think about a lot, for fairly obvious reasons, but I would like to believe that, if I won a Nobel Prize, I would have enough self-control never to mention it to anyone. Not because I am not desperate for approval and prestige! Certainly, absolutely, I would want everyone I ever met to know that I had won a Nobel Prize. I just mean that it would be so much more satisfying (for me) if they found out on their own. Like I would have normal chats with them about the weather every day, and then one day they would say “oh hey someone told me the other day that you had a Nobel Prize, I didn’t know that, that’s amazing, why didn’t you tell me!” And I’d be like “oh that old thing, yeah, it’s not really a big deal, I never think about it.” Look, I do not know if I could pull it off. Would I occasionally drop cryptic references to Stockholm to try to help them along? Sure, of course, I am only human. But I really do think that I’d mostly be able to delay gratification, because when they did figure it out it would be extra sweet.

“On the other hand, in addition to never winning a Nobel Prize, I have never been to Burning Man, and it’s possible that if I spent a week in the desert with weirdly dressed strangers almost all of whom are either tech founders or hedge fund managers, I might just end up wearing my Nobel medal around and taking “Alfred” as my playa name. I assume Burning Man is mostly a weird form of charades where everyone dresses up as a hippie and tries to get you to guess what app they invented. I don’t know. All of this feels far enough removed from my actual experience that I am kind of groping in the dark here.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-05/goldma...

From my experience it is usually not so easy to tell that someone is wealthy/influential, not least because of the unusual clothing often including face masks. Except for models which may be wearing incredibly detailed and beautiful costumes that just amplify their hotness.

For example - this year Ray Dalio was on Burning Man, whom I admire a lot, and I have no idea if I bumped into him or not by accident (probably not due to the scale of the event). On the playa he'd mostly look like a generic Caucasian old man.

I think the point of Matt's column was to point out that it's a bit odd to slip it into every interaction at a place such as burning man, where it doesn't really add any context.

> this year Ray Dalio was on Burning Man, ..., and I have no idea if I bumped into him or not by accident

Do every generic Caucasian old man dress like this there? https://mobile.twitter.com/RayDalio/status/11685714137264087...

That outfit is very ordinary at Burning Man

>Except for models which may be wearing incredibly detailed and beautiful costumes that just amplify their hotness. For example - this year Ray Dalio was on Burning Man

That reads oddly.

Added a paragraph. Please Take Another Look. Although it may have been better with the unintended comedic element.

"models who" would read more normally.

This misses that it might be a rarified form of egotism to privately reject great prizes such as Nobels, knighthoods, and Oscars in the knowledge that this voluntary refusal will probably become public knowledge, sooner or later.

Matt Levine did a hilarious piece on this earlier in the week! https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-05/goldma...

> Burning Man is mostly a weird form of charades where everyone dresses up as a hippie and tries to get you to guess what app they invented

This is great

What bizarre style of writing, as if Burning Man is some thoroughly alien concept and is being described as seen by the curious eyes of an awestruck anthropologist.

Yes, it's believable that this professor found something of interest in the way Burning Man organizes itself but did we real need paragraphs upon paragraphs of this woo-woo style writing?

The cumulative attendance of Burning Man since 1986 is around 1 million people, so that's about the maximum number of people that could have experienced it, if nobody went more than once - but of course, people have, so the real number of unique attendees is lower.

...that means more than 99.7% of the US, and 99.99% of the world has never gone and it is thoroughly alien to them. So a bemused anthropologist seems like the appropriate POV for a general audience.

> 99.99% of the has never gone and it is thoroughly alien to them

Bit of a false dichotomy.

Surely there's a bunch of people who are familiar with Burning Man from photos and videos online but haven't attended personally.

I imagine you could argue the opposite just as easily.

I first heard of it many years ago, but seeing a few photos doesn't mean someone is "familiar" with it from an anthropological perspective. Especially since presumably it's changed a lot over the years.

Right.

I just meant that if you’ve read about it, it probably ain’t thoroughly alien to you.

Not conceptually, but certainly experientially.

I've read about Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn (and seen pictures)...I would say they're still thoroughly alien to me...

That kind of perspective happens unfortunately often, where someone can't fathom a group and has no idea how to relate. They invent pretentious gibberish to hold onto the idea they know what the hell they're talking about.

Unfortunately, when you (as the reader) don't have any better connection to the subject mater, you might not notice how hamfisted, reductive and often denigrating their attempts at explanation are. Then those become the memes with which society treats that group. This happens all the time.

The idea that you should provide a basic layout and some support and then trust the market is interesting. I wonder if people will try it on a real city.

It's a little more than that. All the BM principles are there and necessary. In particular there's no typical "market", as BM runs neither on any form of money, nor on bartering, but instead on unconditional gifting.

From what I read (never been there), "unconditional" does not seem the right word. There seems to be a social rule that a camp is expected to gift. So everyone there is gifting on the condition that everyone else is gifting too.

Some camps don't gift much, and that's fine. But yeah the whole setup only works because so many people are giving things. For starters there would be no artwork if people didn't give - artwork set up in the playa or on a mutant vehicle is also a gift.

It is unconditional in the sense that you just give without asking for anything in return.

Drastic oversimplification. Many of the showcase playa art pieces are funded by grants supplied by the org. Also, while it contradicts the codified principles, there are no shortage of attendees who believe that the gifting thing is reciprocal/transactional and not unconditional.

BM runs on a ton of conventional capital, both through the org and through the corporations that are the largest theme camps.

Aspects of the experience a person has attending Burning Man, happen sans a traditional US dollar based market, though one could argue that all of those forces do carry over even if people aren't exchanging dollars on the playa.

Burning Man is at best analogous to a gated community than a city. Most cities would have a ton of problems magically disappear if they could pick and choose who got to stay and imposed a high "entry fee" regardless of people's incomes.

Another reason to increase nytimes' Gell-Mann amnesia score.

The word "placement" isn't found once in the article, nor is there any mention of the actual significant and broad machinations that the org goes through to plan the city every year.

However, the word "Nobel" appears nearly a dozen times.

NYT has become absolutely terrible about these things. Everything is written in a subtle propaganda style writing.

There is no Economics Nobel prize.

For the down voters, it is "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". It is distinctly not a Nobel prize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom...

I would assume that most of downvoters know this. They are not downvoting because they think you are factually wrong, they are downvoting because your comment was just pedantic and doesn't add anything to the conversation.

The entire intention of the mentioning of the "Nobel winning Economist" is to convey an authority that doesn't exist. I feel anybody relying on this should also have it pointed out that such implied authority is false.

The "authority" of the money originally coming from a different source? Because according to the wikipedia article you linked, that's the main difference.

The authority coming from the Nobel name, which the money is co-opting.

"The interest is to be divided into five equal parts and distributed as follows: one part to the person who made the most important discovery or invention in the field of physics; one part to the person who made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who, in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction; and one part to the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses. The prizes for physics and chemistry are to be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiological or medical achievements by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm; and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be selected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that when awarding the prizes, no consideration be given to nationality, but that the prize be awarded to the worthiest person, whether or not they are Scandinavian."

Tells you a lot about economists that they made themselves a fake Nobel Prize.

What authority is inherently vested by having invented dynamite and wanting to be remembered as something other than a "merchant of death"?

Obviously this is not just about pedantry for its own sake; this is about attacking economics as an illegitimate pseudoscience. But right or wrong, it's still not in any way making a novel statement or argument about anything. A lot of people think economics, economists, and central banks suck. This is common knowledge.

It's utterly useless to debate whether a broad field of study is supported by "authority". If there were a Nobel prize in climatology, would it have any impact on a reasonable person's assessment of the legitimacy of climate science or their attitude towards global warming? Of course not.

If the subject of the article wasn't pompous enough to go out of his way to refer to himself as a 'Nobel Prize Winner' in circumstances that didn't warrant it, I'd agree.

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