Charter — what constitutes great work

The metric

Impact = displacement in joy, estimated by:

1. Depth × breadth. Immense joy for a few and small joy for many are both high impact.
2. Permanence dominates. A permanent displacement outweighs any temporary one.
3. Rank how far it could move the world, not whether that's good or bad. Consequential work often could go either way (a spacefaring species: many will die, Earth may suffer — and survival-in-space is nearly unbounded upside; or space kills us all). Rank by that size. If the work is controversial, say so on the page — the letter does not encode it.
4. Counterfactual, not credit. Compare the world with and without the entity; work that would have happened anyway gets the difference, not the whole.
5. Joy, not pain-removal — pain's relationship with joy is complicated; we don't optimize for its absence.

Priors that shift estimates: long-focused people have outsized outcomes; businesses whose stakeholders are aligned with a long-term mission (and whose people deeply care) displace more durably — extractive ownership structures are evidence against, overridable by specifics.

Stance

Judge loosely; the world needs believers. But always name the bet: what has to become true, and where evidence is thin.

The tier list

The metric above is a ranking, so every fact page carries one: **Tier:** — S, A, B, C, D, F, or unranked, optionally suffixed *. One ladder, every Type on it, absolute against the world rather than graded against Utah.

S	world-historic — permanently different world, and the difference traces to this
A	field-defining — sets a global frontier, or is a live bet whose plausible success is S
B	structurally significant — durably changes how a sector or a state works
C	substantive and replaceable — real scale, close substitute exists
D	local — real to the people in the room, stops at the walls
F	inert — a listing, a ceremony, a duplicate, or a claim nothing corroborates
unranked	too thin to argue bounds from; the honest escape hatch, not a synonym for low

Three calls decide most cases. Tier is the ceiling, not the current quarter. How far, not whether that's good or bad — weapons, surveillance, and extraction rank on how far they could move the world in either direction, and if that's a blessing or a disaster, the page says so. Enablers get only their counterfactual difference, which puts most of the resource shelf at D or F.

The rubric, the rulings, and the worked cases are in tiers.md — read it before assigning a tier. High-impact gems are S and A; starred pages are discovery picks whose pages are unusually revealing or surprising relative to their pure-displacement tier. Fame is neither evidence nor a prior for either signal.

Hooks into the machinery

• ## Impact sections argue depth, breadth, permanence, bounds, counterfactual — prose with reasoning, no scores. A **Tier:** of B or above requires one, and where prose and tier disagree the prose is right.
• **Bet:** names the contrarian premise on pages that have one.
• **Ownership:** attribute records the checkable fact; judgment pages interpret it.
• Wanted-list gaps are ordered by expected impact.

Refined like everything else: probe with hard cases, adjudicate divergence into this doc — or into tiers.md when the disagreement is about placement rather than about the metric (E11).

The builder list

Impact is not the only useful way to find great work. **Builder-tier:** asks how strongly the work reveals people worth betting on under a maximum-faith reading: specific conviction, agency, craft, costly commitment, endurance, chosen leverage, and community formation. It is independent of impact and never claims to know private morality or intrinsic worth. Missing signal is not negative evidence; outsiders usually cannot see why people chose their work.

The generated builder tier list leads with the useful disagreement: active S/A builder signals whose demonstrated impact is still C or below. Rubric and safeguards are in builder-tiers.md.