Hall of fame: who shifted how much

These are the cases where the number argues with the fame: famous people with a small account, obscure ones with a huge one, people whose trace went against their intention. All figures are Fermi estimates by the recipe reach × degree × share, accurate to an order of magnitude; only Harrison was computed by the protocol. The order of the rows is more reliable than the numbers. Units: a Vita (Vt) is one lived life, 2.5 × 10⁷ minutes; kVt is a thousand, MVt a million, GVt a billion.

A "−" before a number means the trace is harmful, "±" that both signs are present. A dagger † marks accounts that count not shifted minutes but lives lived thanks to the person: a saved life goes in at degree 1 for the whole remaining life: a whole Vita for a child, about half for an adult, hence the 0.5 Vt in the rows. That is the site's current convention, and it is in question; see section 1.

Megavitas

Hundreds and tens of kilovitas

Kilovitas

Hundreds and tens of Vitas

Non-persons: events, places, ideas, things

What is counted here is the magnitude of the ideon before division: a place or an event has no chain to share with, only the counterfactual "what would have been otherwise". So the rows of this table are higher than the rows about people by construction, and Paris next to Marx is an illustration, not a comparison. For places almost everything comes from the inhabitants, not from tourists or the image; the degree of a place answers the question of what would be different had the person lived in the neighbouring unit of the same level, and it falls with the level of slicing: city, street, station. For events memory weighs more than broadcast: two hours of spectacle for a billion and a half give less than seventy-five years of Brazilian conversations about the Maracanazo. Among things only ChatGPT has a share: it is a product with authors, and its account is cut by R6.

1. Rescuers above prophets

Under the site's current rules a saved life goes to the rescuer as a whole Vita, and then the summit of the named list is not the founders of religions but a chemist, an agronomist and a virologist. Almost nobody knows Haber or Hilleman, and both stand above Muhammad.

This is the table's strongest consequence and its shakiest. The axiom of completeness divides a minute by who formed its content, while the rows with a dagger pay for the very existence of the minute. The theory does not pay parents for the existence of a child; it pays the rescuer. The pill shows the asymmetry best: a saved life gives a Vita, while an unlived life neither gives nor takes anything, because unlived minutes do not exist. If the rescuer is counted as one of many necessary participants in every saved minute, the dagger rows drop by about an order of magnitude; if only content is counted, they almost vanish. The question is open.

Semmelweis shows the same from the other side. He was right, and the mothers he saved give half a kilovita. But he convinced nobody, and handwashing entered medicine through Lister and Pasteur: an idea that did not reach another head does not count. This is production without sales.

Genghis Khan is the pill in reverse. The forty million dead do not enter his account: there are no unlived minutes, neither for the unborn nor for the killed, and no cross is placed here. What counts is the grief and fear of the survivors and the frame left to the heirs: the Yassa, the legitimacy of the khan's line, the Horde over Rus. In his lifetime he gathered less than a fifth of the account; the rest came from his grandsons' states, the same channel of deeds as Trump's. Sixteen million male-line descendants do not count: that is existence, not content. The ruler measures heads, not deaths, and the bloodiest conquest in history comes out at the level of Marx.

2. Form is worth more than content

Comenius, Braille, Sejong, Guido, Fröbel and Kelly said nothing that people would repeat. They made a form through which other people's minutes pass: the lesson, the script, the alphabet, the staff, the kindergarten, the test with boxes to tick. The degree of a form is small, hundredths, but its reach is all the minutes of everyone who uses it, for centuries. This is why the author of the school timetable stands next to Gutenberg, and the author of a geometry textbook above Tolstoy. Malevich is form literally: almost nobody reads Suprematism or the treatises on non-objectivity, while the square went through his students into the Bauhaus, typography and flat design, where his name is not remembered. Nine tenths of his account is there; the viewers of the square give single Vitas.

There is a limit. Daylight saving time, the keyboard layout, the Gregorian calendar and the standard shipping container touch as many as 10¹⁶ minutes, but their degree is below the smallest division of the protocol, and the honest answer is "from hundreds of Vitas to hundreds of kilovitas". Malcom McLean's container rebuilt world trade and shifted almost nobody's thought: the ruler measures heads, not tons. The Linux kernel is the same container: the most executed code in history, three billion phones, and a degree of zero in the owner's minute; replace the kernel and the minute does not change. Torvalds's account is gathered from developers and through the head start given to cheap infrastructure, not from users; and Git, a two-week side project, possibly weighs more in it than the kernel, because it shapes the programmer's working minute directly. Stallman shows the same split within one account: the content, the four freedoms, gave hundreds of Vitas; the form, the compiler and the licence, gave kilovitas.

3. The inventor of the game versus the player

Naismith is thirty kilovitas; Messi is four hundred Vitas at best. Wynne, Garns, Rubik, Pajitnov and Gygax are kilovitas; Carlsen is tens of Vitas. A player occupies a seat that someone else would have taken without him; the one who invented the game is irreplaceable in all of its minutes at once. The intern who wrote Solitaire is an order of magnitude ahead of the world chess champion.

4. Famous but small

Armstrong, Gagarin, Bolt: enormous reach, the degree of watching, and the share of a man with a backup standing behind him. Aldrin would have been first on the Moon, Titov first in space. Einstein is about a kilovita, two orders below Dr. Spock: almost nobody understands relativity, while about a hundred million children were raised by Spock's book. Chomsky, one of the most cited scholars of his time, stands next to the author of Tetris: science is a narrow channel with a high degree. Erdős is there too, with a record leverage: 0.7 Vita of his own working minutes gave 300–500 Vitas in other people's heads, five hundred times more, above a book. Leverage and absolute size are independent. The Erdős number is a caricature of the chain of credit: distance in the co-authorship graph in handshakes, where every link weighs one, without degree or share. An influencer with a million followers gathers about as much as an ordinary person does within the family. The reason is not the word "influencer" but the unit of counting: a follower in a feed costs half a minute a day at the degree of attention, a podcast listener half an hour a day at the degree of opinion, and the same million gives a hundred times more. Reach must be counted in minutes, not in heads.

5. Fame versus trace

Max Martin has written more than twenty songs that reached number one on the American chart, and nobody recognizes him in the street. Garns died without learning that half the world was solving his puzzle. Nobody knows the authors of "10,000 steps": it was one Japanese physician's exhortation and the name of a pedometer, not a research finding. The Slavic alphabet is called Cyrillic, although Cyril devised Glagolitic, and Cyrillic was put together by his disciples in Bulgaria. The Nobel Prize for penicillin was split three ways, and only Fleming is remembered. Rosa Parks was chosen as the face of the boycott: fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin had done the same nine months earlier. The name is the first thing lost in transmission, and it does not necessarily go to the one who holds the share.

Khufu is the reverse case: the name has lived for forty-five centuries, and the account is modest, hundreds of Vitas. If everyone alive has thought about him for at least two minutes, that is 640 Vitas of raw attention, and between one and six after degree and share: reach without degree weighs almost nothing. The account rests on other things: the builders and subjects in his lifetime, twenty years taken by force, the school and Egyptology, and those who make their living at the pyramid today — the guides and guards add up to as many as the builders once did. A year of fame comes to no more than a fifth of a Vita. The content — cult, power, faith — is lost, while the name survived because it became the label of a unique object. A text needs copyists, a custom needs an institution, and stone needs no one: it is a medium that does not have to be copied, the limit of asynchrony. Duration and account are different things.

The pyramid as a place stands an order of magnitude above Khufu in the table of non-persons: these are the same minutes before division, and the difference between the rows is the pharaoh's share. Lenin's monuments show what stone cannot do: fourteen thousand statues, the most common street name in the country and the mausoleum together give less than a hundred Vitas. A glance at a pedestal is not a minute, and an address is not a thought. Lenin's account in megavitas rests not on bronze but on the form of state and party that two hundred million people carried in their heads for seventy years and China carries still.

A song stuck in the head is an ideon in its pure form: it copies itself inside one head, with no medium and without the owner's consent.

6. Those who regretted

Impact has a sign, and the author does not always choose it. Lizzie Magie designed a game against monopolies, and it became Monopoly. Anna Jarvis founded Mother's Day and fought its commercialization to the end of her life. Kelly is said to have later spoken against the standardized tests that grew out of his invention. Raskin regrets infinite scroll; Kalashnikov, late in life, wrote to the Patriarch about his spiritual pain. Haber received the Nobel Prize for bread from air and directed the first gas attacks. Midgley meant to poison no one, and was wrong twice on a planetary scale.

Raskin is instructive in size as well: two hundred and fifty trillion minutes of other people's attention give only five kilovitas. Attention without a shift weighs almost nothing.

7. Ripe inventions: head start or form

Gutenberg, Haber and Berners-Lee invented what was already ripening: without them others would have done the same within a few years or decades. There are two extreme ways to count this. By head start, a person gets only what happened earlier thanks to him: for Gutenberg that is one generation of readers of incunabula, less than a kilovita. By rigid shift, all later history runs late by the same span, and what is lost is the last twenty-five years of reading, a sizeable part of all printed minutes ever.

The protocol takes the middle. Under rule R6 the weight of a link without which the result would have happened anyway equals the fraction of the horizon lost to the delay: a generation out of six centuries gives Gutenberg about a twentieth, and after sharing with the other links, a few percent of the form of the medium. This is a convention, not a discovery: it silently assumes that a delay is neither made up nor amplified. The rows of the table are counted by it.

ChatGPT is a fresh case of the same rule. The raw estimate of the product as a medium is 7–22 kVt, and under R6 less than three: a one-year lead over competitors on a thirty-year horizon gives a few percent of the channel. The content in a minute of an answer belongs not to the product but to the authors of the corpus: about 100 kVt has already passed through it to them, as much as through Wikipedia in twenty years. It is a re-emitter of the Anonymous, Gutenberg rather than Luther. The open question is what to do when a model begins to produce content that is not in the corpus: for now it counts as a channel, like a reteller.

8. Calculations by parts

The table rows above are abbreviated; here are the full breakdowns of the large accounts.

Karl Marx. the USSR as a frame 5 × 10¹⁵ minutes × 0.02–0.05 × share 0.03–0.1 (form and regime go to Lenin and Stalin), 0.1–1 MVt; China 2.6 × 10¹⁶ × 0.02–0.05 × 0.01–0.03, 0.2–1.6 MVt; Eastern Europe 40–200 kVt; the labour movement and Western social democracy 1870–1950 20–100 kVt; the Cold War in the West 8–50 kVt; the humanities 5–30 kVt; Soviet students, the compulsory 300–400 hours of Marxism-Leninism, 5 × 10⁷ people × 0.1–0.3 × share 0.3–0.5, 1–6 kVt, plus school and party study 1–2; Chinese students 1–5 kVt; readers of the Manifesto and Capital outside the regimes 0.5–1 kVt; grief and fear in the famines and the terror −10–80 kVt; monuments, Highgate and Karl-Marx-Stadt 0.1–3 Vt

Vladimir Lenin. the USSR as a frame for 74 years: 5 × 10¹⁵ subjects' minutes × 0.02–0.05 × share 0.05–0.15 (Stalin takes the rest), 0.2–1.5 MVt; the Leninist party form in China 2.6 × 10¹⁶ × 0.02–0.05 × 0.005–0.015, 0.1–0.8 MVt; Eastern Europe 40–200 kVt; the Lenin cult in school, portraits and slogans 10–50 kVt; the West during the Cold War 4–30 kVt; the texts 1–4 kVt; grief and fear of the terror and the civil war −6–25 kVt; the mausoleum 15–50 Vt; fourteen thousand monuments 0.4–9 Vt

Genghis Khan. subjects in his lifetime 20–170 kVt; fear and grief of the survivors −8–110 kVt; successor states to 1500 60 kVt – 1 MVt at a clan share of 0.03–0.1; Mongolia today 1–12 kVt; the school image worldwide 10–230 Vt

Linus Torvalds. acceleration of cheap infrastructure under P6: 1.3 × 10¹⁵ minutes × 0.1 × head start 0.03–0.06 × share 0.05–0.15, 8–47 kVt; Git 2.5 × 10⁸ person-years × 0.02–0.05 × share 0.1–0.3, 2–18 kVt; developers on Linux 0.5–6 kVt; the form of open development 1–2 kVt; kernel contributors 65–180 Vt; billions of Android and web users below the protocol floor, not counted in the total

Richard Stallman. head start for cheap infrastructure under P6, the same channel: 1.3 × 10¹⁵ minutes × 0.1 × 0.03–0.06 × share 0.03–0.08, 5–26 kVt; GNU tools in the developer's working minute 0.4–5 kVt; copyleft as a form 5 × 10¹² minutes × 0.05 × 0.3–0.5 × 0.5–0.8, 1.5–4 kVt; the content, the four freedoms, 25–760 Vt; free culture beyond code 50–500 Vt; the image and the "GNU/Linux" dispute 16–64 Vt

Kazimir Malevich. designers and architects 3–15 million × working minutes × 0.03–0.05 × share 0.01–0.05 (abstraction was ripe: Kandinsky, Kupka, Mondrian) 70 Vt – 5 kVt; the "is this art?" argument 5–240; students and school 20–250; artist heirs 20–960; reproductions 2–15

Paul Erdős. combinatorics, graphs, number theory to 2100: 1–3 × 10⁴ mathematicians × 60–160 years × 1.2 × 10⁵ minutes a year × 0.1–0.3 × share 0.1–0.3, 30 Vt – 2 kVt; students and olympiad culture 15–160; co-authors in person 0.3–6; the Erdős number and the image 0.1–6

Khufu (Cheops). builders and subjects in his lifetime 60–400 Vt; the image in people's heads, Egyptology and pyramidology 70–600; visitors and those who live off the pyramid today 50–270; the pharaoh's share is 0.1–0.3 throughout

Paris. 0.5–1.2 billion person-years lived × place degree 0.01–0.1; tourists over half a century add 7–24 kVt, the image in the heads of those who never went 0.5–10 kVt

The Great Pyramid. builders 4 × 10⁵ person-years × 0.3–0.5, 1.7–2.8 kVt; the subjects during twenty years of construction 2–5 kVt; those who have lived off it over the last century 0.7–7 kVt; visitors over a century 50–700 Vt; the image in everyone's head 0.2–2 kVt

ChatGPT. 7 × 10¹² minutes of dialogue by 2026 × medium degree 0.05–0.1 × R6 share 0.05–0.1 (assistants were ripe, competitors were a year behind) → 0.7–3 kVt; the frame shift "the machine talks" in everyone adds 1–10; over a 30-year horizon 10¹⁵ minutes of all assistants at the same share