The Tyranny of the Complainers

"Some years ago, Dourado and Russell pointed out a stunning fact about airport noise complaints: A very large number come from a single individual or household.

'In 2015, for example, 6,852 of the 8,760 complaints submitted to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport originated from one residence in the affluent Foxhall neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. The residents of that particular house called Reagan National to express irritation about aircraft noise an average of almost 19 times per day during 2015.'

Since then, total complaint volumes have exploded—but they are still coming from a tiny number of now apparently more “productive” individuals. In 2024, for example, one individual alone submitted 20,089 complaints, accounting for 25% of all complaints! Indeed, the total number of complainants was only 188 but they complained 79,918 times (an average of 425 per individual or more than one per day.)"

The conclusion here seems largely unjustified by the data and indeed is difficult to relate to simple distributions or statistics:

> Increasingly, public institutions seem to exist to manage the obsessions of a tiny number of neurotic—and possibly malicious—complainers.

Why would anyone complain about airport noise when it is ~100% guaranteed to do them no good, and almost all the benefits go to everyone else even if it somehow did anything? Just thinking like an economist here... (Indeed, if a large fraction of locals did complain about something like airport noise, that would itself be highly suspicious to me - as it would indicate an organized campaign or an issue which has become politicized in some way and is now a pretext for something else entirely like a culture war.)

And if there is something I've learned about design and problems, it's that you can have a huge problem, and you are lucky if even 1% will ever tell you.

Your website could be down, and if even 1 person takes the risk of going out of their way to tell you, you should thank your lucky stars that you have such proactive, public-spirited readers!

See also: "Theory of the Nudnik: The Future of Consumer Activism and What We Can Do to Stop It" https://gwern.net/doc/economics/2020-arbel.pdf , Arbel & Shapira 2020; https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... (commentary: https://gwern.net/ref/chevalier-boisvert-2019); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule