Manifesto

1. Significance is measurable

Significance is how much a person changed other people's heads; there is no other reality in which anything can mean something. One measure: how much of other people's thought you shifted, and how deeply. Measured in the Fermi sense: to an order of magnitude, but who is larger and who is smaller holds. The rules of counting are written separately.

2. The ideon and its magnitude

An ideon is what you shifted in someone else's head: a thought, an example, a deed. The magnitude of an ideon is minutes times degree: what part of the minute it took. The unit is the peirce: one minute of someone else's, wholly yours. A film seen by a million people for ten minutes is ten million minutes for the crew. A saved life is all of its future minutes, in share. A retelling is credit to you and to the author. A raised child is their minutes to the extent you shaped them.

3. Credit runs along the chain

Behind the book the author, behind the author a teacher, behind the teacher whoever taught them to read. To each as much as the result would have lacked without them. Little to the reteller, much to the author. Little to the city doctor: a colleague would have stepped in. Everything to the village paramedic: there was nobody to step in.

4. Magnitude and sign are different axes

Hitler and Gandhi are enormous in magnitude and opposite in sign. The theory measures magnitude; the sign is a separate module: by intention, by result, or not at all. Not a replacement for ethics, a ruler for it.

5. The third axis is coherence

Whether what you meant to shift matched what you shifted. A light bulb and a laser spend the same energy. Meditation yields no ideons and changes no sign; it turns the bulb into a laser.

6. As much given as received

There are sixty minutes an hour per person, and each is divided without remainder among those who shaped it: other people, the person themself, nature. There is one conservation law: as much as everyone has given, everyone has received. To get into someone else's minute you have to displace someone from it. An ideon is a flow: it dissipates once forgotten and lives only by re-emission. Leverage is how many minutes of other people's fell on one of yours: below one for a conversation, hundreds for a book. Averaged over humanity, leverage is below one, so not everyone can be above parity.

7. The threshold

A Vita is all the waking minutes of one person over a lifetime, 25 million. You received almost all of yours on credit: from language, parents, friends, strangers. Parity is when you have returned as much. The typical person dies at about 0.2 Vita.

8. The largest account is unsigned

Language, fire, counting, the wheel, proverbs. More than half of all impact in history is on the Anonymous. The name dissipates faster than the content: the longer an ideon lives, the more anonymous it is.

9. Consequences

Degree weighs more than views. What lives long is what detaches from its author and their name. The irreplaceable one in an empty place weighs more than the strong one in a crowd. Fame and trace are different accounts, and they rarely coincide. This theory is an ideon too, and everything said here applies to it.