Examples and estimates

All figures are Fermi estimates, accurate to an order of magnitude. Which row stands above which is robust to any reasonable choice of parameters; the absolute values are not. Conventions: 1 peirce = 1 minute of someone else's thought at degree 1 and share 1; 1 Vt = 2.5 × 10⁷ peirces; a person has about 350,000 waking minutes per year.

1. Who leads in absolute terms

The typical person: about 0.2 Vt. Almost all of it is children (about 0.05 Vt each per parent) and close people. A parent's share is more modest than it seems: in teaching a child to speak and to live, a parent mostly passes on what belongs to others, and the larger share goes along the chain to the Anonymous. The earlier bottom-up estimate gave 0.4 Vt and did not agree with the conservation law: if more than half of every minute belongs to the Anonymous, close people are left with about a third of the human part. The protocol keeps the earlier figure as it was. That is the median; the mean outgoing account equals the mean incoming one by the conservation law, and the tail, the Anonymous and the founders of religions, holds the difference. Check: 117 billion people who lived about a third of a Vita on average give on the order of 10¹⁸ minutes, humanity's budget.

Trump: many minutes, small degree. People think about him a lot, but he changes the direction of their thought very little: degree 0.05, the protocol's category “opinion”. This is the account of one channel, attention, and its R₀ after his death is probably below one: hardly anyone thinks about the presidents of a century ago. The channel of deeds is not included. Borders, courts, alliances and neighbours' fears are re-emitted by states on schedule and live for centuries: Canada still remembers the War of 1812. That account is not closed, and under the protocol the future is not counted in advance.

The leader among named accounts is a founder of a religion. Only they have all four multipliers large at once: broad reach, deep degree (a frame, not an opinion), a self-sustaining chain and high irreplaceability. Muhammad is probably ahead of Jesus: five prayers a day cost more in minutes, and his share is higher, because he was prophet and lawgiver in one person, and the text was fixed within the first generation. But both shares are diluted: half of Jesus's account goes to Paul, the evangelists and Constantine; Muhammad's goes to the rightly guided caliphs, the codifiers of the Quran and the collectors of hadith.

The absolute leader is the Anonymous. Language takes part in every minute of every person at a degree close to one, but by Shapley it is smeared across millions. The question "who leads" has two answers: by the ledger, nobody; by name, a prophet.

2. Two languages and one donor

Ben-Yehuda and Zamenhof were born a year apart, both Jews from the Russian Empire, both made a language. Hebrew has about nine million speakers who think in it every minute of their lives; the accumulated minutes since the 1920s are on the order of 10¹⁴, the degree of the language choice is 0.15, and Ben-Yehuda's share in the revival is 5–10 percent (Zionism was already pulling toward Hebrew, and the schools did most of the work). About 50 kVt today, and the account keeps growing, because children get the language for free. Esperanto: about ten million learners over 140 years and about a hundred thousand active speakers, on the order of 3 × 10¹¹ minutes, degree 0.5 (these minutes are entirely voluntary), share 0.4 (he designed the language personally). About 3 kVt, stable. The twentyfold difference is explained by one word: the state. Hebrew is re-emitted through birth, Esperanto through a decision. A state re-emits more reliably than any other carrier.

James Harrison donated plasma with rare anti-D antibodies 1,173 times over sixty years. The first estimate on this page gave him 5–30 kVt and was wrong: the "2.4 million" in the press is doses and mothers, not babies saved. A recount under the protocol, with rules written before the calculation, gives the whole Australian anti-D program 4–9 thousand lives saved, and Harrison a share of 0.03 to 7 percent, hence 1–700 Vt. Half of the three-order interval is one question: whether the program would have replaced one donor in a small pool. But this is an ideon that passed only through the channel of deeds: no words, no reach, only degrees. A plus sign, no disputed cases in the channel, coherence of one. It is the only account on this site computed under the rules.

3. A Wikipedia editor

The formula: yearly page views of your articles × 2 minutes of reading × 0.2 (degree: other sources exist) × 0.5 (another editor could have written it, but you did) × authorship share (your bytes relative to the article's size).

A real calculation via the API for an editor of the Russian Wikipedia, active since 2003, with about 900 surviving created articles and ten million page views a year: a rate of about 22 mVt per year, about 0.2 Vt accumulated, and 0.6 Vt after another twenty years at the same rate. That is like four raised children. With the typical person's background of 0.2 Vt, parity is reached after roughly forty years of editing.

Wikipedia is the model case of repaying the debt: anonymous ideons by charter, a long chain, high R₀. And this theory cannot be added to it, because original research is prohibited there.

4. What money buys

A billion dollars buys two or three Vitas if spent on minutes, and tens of thousands if spent on degrees.

The difference between the rows is explained by one thing: the market trades in minutes, not degrees. A minute of attention has a price, about a cent, and the feed and television sell it. A degree has no market. Charity buys degrees at the price of minutes, four orders of magnitude cheaper; effective altruists noticed this first.

5. Art

The only channel where reach and depth cannot be separated: the form is the content, and Tolstoy cannot be paid separately for the ideas and separately for the craft. This is why art is the strongest type of ideon, with the best ratio of half-life to cost. A three-minute song can carry 10¹¹ minutes, and all the Beatles songs together about 10¹³: at a listening degree of 0.01–0.03 that comes to about four thousand Vitas among the four of them. About a thousand more come from the minutes when a song is stuck in the head and plays by itself: capture in its pure form, with no player. The Mona Lisa, with ten million visitors a year over a century, gave Leonardo only about two Vitas, because the degree of a visit is close to zero: it is a social act, not a shift.

Art shifts perception rather than opinion, and the theory systematically underestimates it. It also becomes anonymous fastest: form is copied without a name, which is why folklore, memes and jokes, the longest-lived ideons, are all authorless. Art for art's sake does not exist in the ledger: unheard music equals a forest that touched no one. Dickinson was zero in her lifetime and much afterwards, and the ledger does not care when.

6. Why some ideons fade faster

The right-hand column contains neither the word "truth" nor the word "importance". Ideons fade not because they are false or unimportant, but because they are expensive to copy, rarely come up, and are attached to nothing.