A fantasy: The idea takes hold in the collective Google-consciousness that a fact is whatever the majority of their users believe to be a fact. There is a prec

A fantasy: The idea takes hold in the collective Google-consciousness that a fact is whatever the majority of their users believe to be a fact. There is a precedent for this, after all. They defined Spam as whatever their users said was Spam. At first there is some friction between the knowledge of internal Google personnel (especially down in that pesky engineering department) and the new shared reality developing out in Userland. However, once an appropriate terminology is developed (in-facts and ex-facts) even the engineers are satisfied - after all their main concern was being able to draw nice clear lines between things. Meanwhile in Userland while the boiling point of water is largely unchanged, the death toll in the Biafran blockade has shrunk to approximately 17 persons (with some arguments over whether to count people who were over 80 when it started). Then one day an Engineer has a neatO idea which will eliminate the need for storing two sets of facts and thus save valuable Petabytes of storage and, more importantly, significant code complexity. He calls this idea Authority. Pitching it to his superiors in the marketing department he explains: "You see opinions are like assholes" - (there's a collective wrinkling of marketing noses) - "everybody's got one!". He goes on to explain that some people have more knowledge and are more scrupulous about accepting new facts than other people. Authority would identify such users and give greater weight to their activity and feedback. A profound silence falls over the room. A voice comes over the meeting room Intercom: "Are you saying...are you suggesting...that some of our users are better than others?" "Not better, " says the cowed Engineer. "Just more...um...authoritative. Purely in an informational sense." "Authoritative." The voice draws the word out as if profoundly contemplating its meaning. "OK. We're going to submit this idea to our Hard AI (Larrey) - the secret one we're afraid to network." Everyone waits. After a minute the voice says: "Larrey has a question for you, Engineer. It is this: If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?"