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I'd go even farther than that and suspect that in many areas avoiding blunders gets more important climbing to higher levels.

Just the other day I explained this to my daughter:

In our school system a 1 is the best grade a 6 the worst.

Maintaining a 2.0 average is kind of easy. When you blunder and get a 3, all you have to so is getting a 1 eventually to compensate.

Maintaining a 1.0 average is much, much harder, because you have to write 1s consistently without any exception and no way to fix a blunder(*).

In many systems there is a hard ceiling of what you can achieve. When your performance is measured as an average, this makes the system more unforgiving for blunders the closer you are to the ceiling.

(*) Technically, in our school system this is not entirely correct, because I think you could theoretically get 0.7s. The overall point still stands, because there is a hard and positive limit.



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