How the tier list works

This is the ranking behind the list. The charter says impact is how far something could move the world. Every company, lab, person, project, and program page gets a letter on that scale. Source pages and guides don't — a citation and a how-to don't move the world on their own.

If you're just browsing, the letters mean:


S	the world is permanently different, and you can trace the difference to this
A	sets a global frontier, or is a live bet that would be S if it worked
B	changes how a whole sector or a whole state works
C	real work at real scale, and someone else could do it
D	real to the people in the room, and it stops at the walls
F	a listing, a ceremony, a duplicate, or a claim nothing backs up
unranked	the page is too thin to rank. That's an honest answer, not a polite word for "low"

A few things that trip people up:

The letter is the ceiling, not this quarter's results. A company that hasn't shipped yet can outrank a profitable one, if the plan would actually reorder something.
We rank size, not goodness. Weapons, surveillance, and mines sit high when they could move the world a long way in either direction. Whether that's a blessing or a disaster is argued on the page, not encoded in the letter.
A * means we bumped it one step because the page is unusually worth reading — funny, strange, or a good window into how Utah actually works. Strip the stars and you have the pure ranking.
Inside a letter, there is no order. Arguing whether Fervo beats Recursion is a worse use of an afternoon than finding the page that's in the wrong letter by two steps.
A low letter is not a vote to delete the page. F is the right answer for "who do I call in Cedar City." The list only changes what you read first.

The rest of this page is for people assigning a letter. Read the charter first — this file doesn't make sense without it.

Why it looks like a Smash tier list

Because those lists already solved the problems this one has. Six rules do most of the work:

One list. A defense plant, a Nobel lab, a cookie franchise, and a county chamber all get asked the same question. There is no "best resource" consolation bracket. The page's Type is not a handicap.
Rank what it can do, not what it did last year. A character is top tier for what it does in the best hands. Same here: rank the biggest plausible effect, not headcount or press.
Beloved is not a tier. Neither is effort, nobility, hardship, longevity, local pride, or being the only one who showed up. A list of Utah's favorite institutions would be a different document, and a less useful one.
No curve. Letters are absolute against the world, not graded against Utah. A state is allowed to have empty space at the top. Most of a corpus is allowed to sit low. Grading on a local curve is how a tier list turns into a brochure.
Letters move. A bet that fails drops. A lab result that replicates climbs. Re-run the list; don't defend last year's letter.
No order inside a letter. That's as fine-grained as the judgment supports.

Expected shape, as a warning rather than a quota: S in the low single digits of a percent, A under a tenth of the corpus, and the mass in C and D. If S grows past roughly 4% of fact pages, the rubric has drifted. Fix this file, not the pages.

The calls that actually decide placements

Each of these was settled against a real page.

Rank the page's own subject, not the famous topic it touches. The transcontinental railroad is S and Utah being ARPANET's fourth node is A, and that's not because the railroad matters more than the internet. The railroad page is about the railroad. The ARPANET page is about Utah being node four, whose other timeline is a different university getting a number. When a page is framed as "Utah's role in X", that role is what gets ranked. A letter two steps below the topic's importance is often a sign the page is aimed too narrowly.

This includes work Utah claims but didn't host. Fletcher invented stereo at Bell Labs. Farnsworth did the decisive television work in San Francisco and Idaho. Hall's first diamond synthesis was at GE. Those pages still rank as the inventions they're named for, because that's what they're about. Hall's Utah press page ranks lower because that page already scoped itself to the Utah press work. The ladder is an audit of how the page is framed. A page that wants an honest letter has to pick an honest subject.

For a multinational, the subject in this corpus is usually its Utah operation, unless the page argues that the whole company is the point. Adobe is the pattern: the company is A-shaped, the page is about Adobe's Utah engineering hub, so it is B. A page titled for the global corporation because of a plant in Utah is carrying two subjects. Until it picks one, rank the Utah operation — that's why the page is here.
Size, not goodness. Northrop's Promontory plant builds the boosters for Artemis and the solid stages of the nuclear deterrent. The NSA's Utah data center is an intelligence capability of unbounded reach. Bingham Canyon electrified a country and left a hole and a contaminated aquifer. All rank high. If the work is controversial, the page says so — the letter does not. A list that flinched here would put Utah's most consequential work below its most agreeable work.
A claim you can't check is not a large claim. It's no claim. A seed-stage company whose deck implies a reordered industry, with nothing checkable behind it, is F or unranked — not A marked down to C. Where there's nothing to estimate, there's nothing to estimate. This is not a second Confidence field. A High-confidence page can be F (a chamber of commerce, sourced perfectly) and a Low-confidence page can be A (a live bet whose scale is obvious and whose evidence is thin).
An unproven bet keeps its ceiling. An implausible one does not. Judge loosely — the world needs believers. A credible program whose success would be S sits at A while it is unfinished, one step down, not four. Fervo and Recursion are ranked on what the bet is worth if it lands, because that is the number a reader deciding where to spend five years actually needs. Name the bet with **Bet:** and let the reader discount it. Demote only when the premise or the company's path to capturing the result stops being believable.

Do not divide a field's prize mechanically by its number of pursuers. Competition changes the probability that this company wins; it does not make the consequence of winning smaller. The question is whether the company has a checkable path to a disproportionate share of the result: a technical architecture, natural asset, data advantage, regulatory position, manufacturing method, validated result, or deployment wedge that could compound if it works. "We also pursue a huge market" is not enough. Being the only pursuer is not required, either. Fervo's 500 MW project and Zanskar's blind-system confirmation are strong cases; a less famous company can clear the same bar with a distinctive mechanism and credible milestone even before scale or consensus arrives. This is the difference between "the field would change the world" and "this particular approach has a believable way to change it."
Enablers get what wouldn't have happened without them, which is usually small. An accelerator, chamber, association, event, or economic-development office is ranked on the difference it made — nearly always a small acceleration of work that had other routes, however much throughput passes through. Almost the entire resource shelf lands at D or F, and that's the rubric working. The exception is an enabler that is itself irreplaceable infrastructure: the Utah Population Database is high tier because BRCA was findable in Utah and not elsewhere, and Utah FORGE because there is no second US field laboratory de-risking enhanced geothermal.
Depth can make up for a small audience. Immense joy for a few still counts. A basic-science observatory touching a few hundred physicists, or a hospice with a dozen beds, is ranked on depth and permanence and is not capped for having a small audience. What caps it is replaceability, which is a different question.
A letter is not a verdict on whether the page should exist. The charter categorizes and never gatekeeps. F is the right answer for a page that is still the right answer to a local question. What the ladder changes is reading order, not membership.
A person ranks on what they caused, not on their best company's letter. A person page is not a trophy shelf. Inheriting a founder's company letter would count the same displacement twice. Rank what this person caused across a career that the field would not have produced without them — which sometimes exceeds any one of their companies, and much more often falls below the most famous one.
Something exceptionally funny or interesting may be bumped one letter, marked with *. Every tier list has the character who is objectively mid and at the top of everyone's watch list, and pretending otherwise makes a worse list. A* means ranked A, of which one step is charisma — so stripping the stars recovers the pure ranking. Rules: one step, never two; it may reach A* but never S, because the top of the list is a claim about the world; and it has to be earned by the page being disproportionately worth reading, never by affection for the subject. Pons and Fleischmann is the worked case: what it displaced was a cautionary tale about how not to announce a discovery, and it is still the most interesting hour in the history of Utah science. The bump is most useful at the bottom, where it rescues a genuinely delightful page from the F pile and gets it read.
Fame is neither evidence nor a prior. Rate from the page's mechanism, assets, milestones, and plausible bounds before considering name recognition, revenue rank, press volume, or whether the company appears on every Utah business list. Obscurity does not earn a promotion, but it must not hide a credible path. When two pages make equally strong impact cases, the unfamiliar one is not the riskier rating merely because fewer people have heard of it. The ladder should produce discoveries as a consequence of judgment, not reproduce consensus as a substitute for judgment.

How this hooks into the rest of the wiki

An ## Impact section is where the argument lives — depth, breadth, permanence, bounds, counterfactual, in prose, no scores. A letter of B or above needs one.
**Tier:** is that argument's conclusion. Where they disagree, the prose is right.
**Bet:** names the contrarian premise on pages that have one.
High-impact gems are S and A. Starred pages are discovery picks: unusually revealing or surprising pages worth reading above their pure-displacement letter. Neither signal is awarded for fame.
The wanted list is ordered by the letter the missing page would plausibly hold.

Where the letters came from

First assigned across the whole corpus on 2026-08-11, 485 fact pages in one pass, by subagents working from this file plus a hand-placed anchor set, with every S and A checked by hand afterward. Method, the anchors, and the disagreements found on the way are in research/tier-list/. When two raters disagree, that's a gap in this document, and the fix goes here rather than into the pages.