I didn’t get it… is the problem with the “look for N opinions” response that you aren’t computing the denominator (|”intervening is positive”| + |”intervening is negative”|)?
Yes, that’s the problem. In this situation, if N << population / 2, you are likely to not intervene even when the intervention is net positive; if N >> population / 2, you are likely to intervene even when the intervention is net negative.
(This is under the simple model of a one-shot decision where each participant gets a noisy observation of the true value with the noise being iid Gaussians with mean zero.)
I didn’t get it… is the problem with the “look for N opinions” response that you aren’t computing the denominator (|”intervening is positive”| + |”intervening is negative”|)?
Yes, that’s the problem. In this situation, if N << population / 2, you are likely to not intervene even when the intervention is net positive; if N >> population / 2, you are likely to intervene even when the intervention is net negative.
(This is under the simple model of a one-shot decision where each participant gets a noisy observation of the true value with the noise being iid Gaussians with mean zero.)