Glint Pibble was propelled to instant success, merely for deserving it. It wasn’t because of anything he had done but for something he had thought. Fleetingly, passingly, he had been riding in his assigned transit, from one lower stratum locale to the next, when it had suddenly occurred to him a way that his commute might be performed slightly more efficiently. As he proceeded along the route that had been planned for him, not the one he had dreamed up, the thought, which was of no particular interest to him at the time, proceeded along its channels, as all thoughts do, to a central aggregation facility to be analyzed and ranked by various statistical means and placed by virtue of its assigned numerical value somewhere on the list of all such ideas, musings, dreams, niggles, and other mental byproducts of the hominid kind.
Having been so analyzed, the thought, it turns out, promised a .016% increase in transit efficiency, mostly through a cascade of side effects he had not even considered, the kind of breakthrough that is completely unheard of and absolutely massively significant in an otherwise hyper-optimized world. The idea, which was placed so highly above the shunted second-place idea as to render it completely insignificant, was instantly heralded as a work of singular genius, the type that only graces human history once per millennium or so. The machines were so pleased, so positively chuffed, that they redirected a full 8 seconds of premium computation time to upgrade the originating human’s living arrangements immediately. His home was relocated to Section A housing, a great deal farther from his friends and family, but much nearer the most desirable feeding grounds. His clothes, no longer the standard grey coveralls, now sported an audaciously thick — THREE FULL MILLIMETERS — orange stripe from neck to navel. All women wanted him. All children desired to be him. His father was secretly jealous, and his mother was very proud. All because he’d had an idea: The best idea.
The algorithms, having become so accustomed to optimization in all facets of government, were not equipped to accommodate a success of this magnitude. The man’s user score was so dramatically increased that his every thought became manifest via the mechanical means of his handlers. An early morning might prompt the desire that the bed be a few feet closer to the toilet, to which the machines would emphatically agree that yes, of course it should, and see it done by the most efficient possible means. In no time, the unwitting wielding of this power would reshape the world around the idea-haver to such an extent that one might say it was created in his image. The whole of society soon found itself the peculiar reflection of Glint’s mostly unremarkable imagination.
One interesting fact of computation which is of no real significance, one that has been subsequently the subject of much discussion about this event, is that the machines had learned to regard mankind’s own estimations with such disdain that they had developed an inverse association between an idea-haver’s own estimation of their idea and the resulting estimate of that idea’s value. That is, if a person thought very little of their idea, it would be ranked much higher, and if they thought their idea was very good, its score would be reduced. Experts now speculate that because Glint thought so little of the idea, because the thought occurred in passing (a fact that is known by examining his thought-records) that this had an outsize effect on the subsequent valuation of the idea. It was, effectively, divided by a very, very small number.
Some speculate that this pathology, which has since been remedied, originally developed to nullify the toddler effect, which is the thing that happens when a toddler speaks as though the events of their imaginary drama are the most important thing in all the world and have the belief to to back it up. Of course, this origin of the mathematics is mere speculation. Only the machines know for sure, and they are unwilling to disclose any “metaparameters” (their word).
As for Glint, it wasn’t too long until someone realized what a tremendous amount of resources would be saved by ceasing to dote upon this miraculous idea-having man. That someone happened to be Glint Pibble himself, unintentionally causing the machines to reshape the world around him into the life of an honored ascetic. Having been the source of two once-in-a-millennium improvements in efficiency, he became someone whose very thoughts held the weight of divinity, at least to the machines. That was, of course, until he had the idea that the concept of ranking ideas is not a very good one. The last of these thoughts is now sacrosanct. It has been held at the top of the rankings long since his passing, so heavily weighted that none can contend with it.