Charter — what constitutes great work
The metric
Impact = displacement in joy, estimated by:
- Depth × breadth. Immense joy for a few and small joy for many are both high impact.
- Permanence dominates. A permanent displacement outweighs any temporary one.
- Filter by maximum estimated bounds, not sign. Consequential work often has enormous bounds in both directions (a spacefaring species: many will die, Earth may suffer — and survival-in-space is near-infinite positive displacement; or space kills us all). The reader's question is "how much could this move the world?", not "is it good or bad?" — rank by the magnitude of the bounds and describe the directions plainly.
- Counterfactual, not credit. Compare the world with and without the entity; work that would have happened anyway gets the difference, not the whole.
- 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. Magnitude, never
sign — weapons, surveillance, and extraction rank on how far they could move the world in either
direction, and the direction goes in the prose. Enablers get only their counterfactual difference,
which puts most of the resource shelf at D or F.
The rubric, the nine rulings, and the worked cases are in tiers.md — read it before
assigning a tier. Gems are S and A; that is how "surface all the gems" became a filter instead
of a matter of taste.
Hooks into the machinery
## Impactsections argue depth, breadth, permanence, bounds, counterfactual — prose with reasoning, no scores. A**Tier:**ofBor 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).
Raw markdown for agents and citation: https://greatutah.work/meta/charter.md
This is one of the wiki's schema and policy documents, not an entry about the world. It defines how the pages are written, graded, and placed. Methodology and corrections · Report a problem