Imagine you allowed blending. Everything on one scale — good positive, bad negative — and you add it up.
Most people do this quite naturally. It feels sophisticated, doesn't it? Weighing things up. Being balanced. Very grown-up.
So let's do it. The good outcome: worth +100. The permanent catastrophe: −50.
100 + (−50) = 50
A positive number. Well then. Do it.
And that is madness. You can see exactly where it fails, once you look.
The +100 assumes you're still around to collect it. If the catastrophe happens, there is no +100 — there's no you-who-gets-the-good-thing. The scale quietly assumed you'd survive to enjoy the gain, and the whole reason it's a catastrophe is that you don't.
That isn't a moral objection. It's an arithmetic one. The single scale is broken because it treats I gain a hundred and I'm removed from the board as the same kind of quantity. They aren't. One is a result. The other is the end of results.
The original puts it exactly: once structure collapses, navigation stops. You can't keep steering the boat if you've been taken off the water altogether.
Where the blend does its damage
Why does this matter in your actual life? Because the blend is where you talk yourself into things.
Think about the last time you did something you knew was risky, and the sentence that was in your head. I'd wager it sounded like: yes — but the upside is huge.
That sentence is the blend. That's all it is. You've taken a catastrophe and a benefit, mashed them onto one scale, and let the benefit cover the catastrophe. And it works beautifully — because you're not doing arithmetic. You're telling a story. A story can make any number balance any other number.
The original names it precisely: narrative inflation of but the upside is huge cannot compensate for structural collapse risk. Catastrophic downside cannot be smoothed by storytelling.
Keeping the boxes separate blocks that move. If permanent harm has to sit in its own box, alone, out where you can see it, then no amount of upside can reach across and cancel it. You have to look at it. It stays visible.
So the separation was never fussiness. It's a wall — and it keeps the story out.