In five minutes
The theory does one thing: it assigns a person a number for how much of other people's thought they shifted. Here it is on a single example, without the other pages.
James Harrison, an Australian, gave plasma with rare anti-D antibodies for more than half a century. It is made into a drug that stops a mother's body from harming her baby in a later pregnancy. The question: how much did he matter?
1. Minutes
The unit is a minute of someone else's thought. A saved life is all the future minutes of the person saved, about 25 million. That many minutes make one Vita (Vt): all the waking thought of one person over a lifetime.
The whole Australian anti-D programme over 58 years prevented 4–9 thousand deaths, which is 4–9 thousand Vitas. Those lives do not belong to Harrison alone: the programme was the work of many.
2. Degree
Degree is what part of someone else's minute you captured. Life instead of death is a shift of the whole minute, degree 1. For comparison, an opinion weighs 0.05 and attention without a shift 0.01. Degrees come from a short fixed table, and fitting them to the result is forbidden.
3. Share
A drug is a chain: the discoverers of the antibodies, the national programme, the pool of donors (fewer than two hundred people), the doctors, and among them Harrison. Each gets as much as the result would have lacked, or arrived late, without them. The antibodies would have been found without one group: they were discovered independently twice within three years. A donor in a small pool can be replaced by a new volunteer or by imports. Harrison's share comes out at 0.03 to 7 per cent.
4. The result
4–9 thousand Vitas × share 0.0003–0.07 = 1 to 700 Vt.
An interval of three orders of magnitude is not an oversight: the theory measures the order of magnitude, not an exact number. Half of the interval is a single question: could the programme have replaced one donor in a small pool or not.
What this shows
- One Vita is the working threshold of parity: you returned into other people's heads at least as much as you received. A typical person reaches about 0.2 Vt. At the lower bound Harrison is a little above the typical person, at the upper bound far above.
- The earlier estimate on this site was 5–30 kVt, and it was wrong: “2.4 million saved babies” in the press are doses and mothers, not babies. The count under pre-registered rules caught it.
- Significance here is measured not by fame but by what would have been different without you.
Next
- Manifesto — the nine theses of the theory.
- Protocol — the same steps with figures, sources and a blind check.
- Hall of fame — hundreds of other accounts, from Haber to the author of sudoku.