AIM Framework glossary
Time-Buying Principle
Canonical definition
The Time-Buying Principle is the corollary of the Leadership Compression Principle that an operation on authority acts on the interval between a decision and its consequence and on no coupling forming the Internal Loop Gain. Distributing command authority over crisis-relevant resources, control of information, appointment power and Appetitive leverage, so that no single node can compress that interval below the time correction requires, therefore buys the interval and not the correction: authority distribution preserves the system long enough for gain reduction to remove the instability, and cannot itself convert the crisis geometry. Any reform adding friction between a leader's Mimetic shock and crisis imposition serves survival in proportion to the friction added, even where the reform falls short of the full architecture.
Explanation
Spreading power across many hands does not make a dangerous society safe. What it does is stop any one person turning a bad decision into a catastrophe faster than anyone can intervene. It buys time, and time is what the slower work of making the society less dangerous needs in order to finish. Because it buys time rather than removing the danger, it is needed alongside that slower work and never in place of it, and every added check between a leader's decision and its consequences is worth having even before the whole design is in place.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Named Result (Corollary to the Leadership Compression Principle).