AIM Framework glossary
Status-Premium Duality
Canonical definition
The Status-Premium Duality states that the Mimetic Premium and the mimetic component of Status (Status-PM) are one Salience contribution, conserved across the emission-valuation channel rather than caused-and-left-behind at either end. A Salience signal emitted by an Individual, or borrowed by an inanimate Object from the Models observed valuing it, is, on the receiving side, valued by each observer's Observer under that observer's own Belief Register; the component of the observer's valuation attributable to that Salience, rather than to A-function or I-enablement, is the Mimetic Premium that observer computes. Status-PM, the mimetic component of the emitter's Status, is that same contribution viewed from the population side: the low-pass, time-averaged aggregate of the Mimetic Premiums computed across observers. One observer's Mimetic Premium is therefore a single, privately-conditioned term in the sum that is the emitter's Status-PM, and Status-PM is the aggregated Mimetic Premium — a summation and a time-average, neither of which discards any of the contributions being summed and averaged. (The full dyadic valuation, of which the Mimetic Premium is the Referent-less component, is the observer's Salience; its population aggregate is the emitter's full Status, comprising the Referent-backed Status-A and Status-I together with Status-PM. The Salience-Status Identity is that full-valuation correspondence; the Status-Premium Duality is its Referent-less, mimetic slice.) Because the valuation is entirely the observer's, computed under the observer's own Belief Register, and because the observed controls at most a curated subset of the signals on which it is computed while much of what is read (appearance, accent, posture, age, group markers, and, for an inanimate Object, every signal) is ambient and involuntary, the received Premium is determined by the observer, not set or bounded by the observed (Salience-Emission Asymmetry). This is why one observed entity draws different Premiums from different observers while Status, the aggregate, is smooth; why the mimetic component is a gradient valuation the observed cannot control rather than the binary fact of being Salient (worthy of attention); and why a scapegoat cannot govern the axes on which their Salience is received and calculated (Chapter 11).
Explanation
Being noticed and being valued are the two ends of one wire. You, or an object through the people seen wanting it, put out a signal; everyone who notices then privately works out how much to value it, and the part of their valuation that comes from the signal rather than from any real use is the mimetic premium they place on it. Add up everyone's premium and smooth it across the crowd, and that aggregate is status. The premium one person pays and the status a thing holds are not two independent things that happen to move together: the premium is that same contribution as one person sees it, and the status is that contribution totalled across everyone, with none of it lost in the totalling. You control, at most, some of what you put out; you never control what others read into you, or the ambient signals (your face, your voice, your bearing) that they read it from. That is why the same thing is worth different amounts to different people, why status is a sliding scale rather than an on/off light, and why a scapegoat is helpless: the axes on which they are judged are not theirs to set.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Principle. Bridges the Salience-Status Identity (scale) and the Salience-Emission Asymmetry (control).