AIM Framework glossary
Status Non-Beneficiality Principle
Canonical definition
The pursuit of Status-PM delivers no benefit to the pursuer or to the field. The pursuer may gain position, and the gain is real, but it does not discharge the lack that prompted it, the reading that prompted it having recorded no shortfall for any gain to close; the pursuer therefore arrives higher and lacking as much as before, having spent real Appetitive and Intrinsic resource getting there. The field pays for a redistribution of rank rather than an increase in it, the position one Individual gained being the position another lost, and the transfers repair no Appetitive deficit and support no Intrinsic engagement for whoever receives them. The Status Non-Beneficiality Principle holds of Status-PM alone: Status-A tracks a functional contribution others needed and Status-I an enrichment they received, and both are benefits delivered to somebody. Nothing in the pursuit is irrational. Every step is taken on the evidence available and resolved as the architecture entails, and what the shortfall marks is a restriction on what the reasoning had to work with, the impoverished M-Hypothesis Space, in either of its two forms: the true account is unavailable to the Individual for want of any framing of it, or a settled conviction absorbs the framing that exists so that the account arrives too faint to move anything.
Explanation
Every step up the status ladder feels like progress and costs more than it returns, and nothing in the feeling lets you notice. What you would need in order to notice is a reading of where the wanting came from, and that cannot be read off the wanting, because the three sources were summed; it can only be inferred, and only with the M-Hypothesis. So the certainty that things are going well rises on the same curve as the welfare that is falling. Knowing all of this does not help inside the pursuit: being right about the game confers no advantage while you are playing it. And because whatever absorbs the accumulating cost is finite, the ending is not in doubt, only its date.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Named Result. Derived at Chapter 8, Section 8.12.8 from the satiation results of Section 8.5 and the Status decomposition of Section 8.12.3.