To the parent comment: I really hope that such a system is used only to filter very very concrete "facts", because especially in the area of science, things can change quite quickly and it would be horrible if something really true in new research got smothered by that.
It's hard to give any new examples precisely because those things tend to be "unthinkable", so this will be a rather contrived and anachronistic one, but imagine if Google thought the Sun rotated around the Earth based on the large body of knowledge society had accumulated in the past, and penalised new research that indicated otherwise...
Even only filtering by very concrete facts is going to not work, especially for the social sciences.
For example, the NISVS 2010 shows that quite factually, female rapes within the last year vastly outnumber male rapes... using a definition of rape that excludes the majority of cases where men are forced to have sex against their will. I highly doubt that a factual database would include such intricacies as the specific definitions used to give a fact.
Or for a less charged and more natural sciences inclined example, consider facts about gravity. Newtonian gravity isn't quite correct, but it can safely be treated as a fact by the general population who aren't familiar with the physics behind gravity.
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That's just... creepy.
To the parent comment: I really hope that such a system is used only to filter very very concrete "facts", because especially in the area of science, things can change quite quickly and it would be horrible if something really true in new research got smothered by that.
It's hard to give any new examples precisely because those things tend to be "unthinkable", so this will be a rather contrived and anachronistic one, but imagine if Google thought the Sun rotated around the Earth based on the large body of knowledge society had accumulated in the past, and penalised new research that indicated otherwise...
Even only filtering by very concrete facts is going to not work, especially for the social sciences.
For example, the NISVS 2010 shows that quite factually, female rapes within the last year vastly outnumber male rapes... using a definition of rape that excludes the majority of cases where men are forced to have sex against their will. I highly doubt that a factual database would include such intricacies as the specific definitions used to give a fact.
Or for a less charged and more natural sciences inclined example, consider facts about gravity. Newtonian gravity isn't quite correct, but it can safely be treated as a fact by the general population who aren't familiar with the physics behind gravity.