Why it is not just the Monkey inverted

The obvious design is to compute one number and flip the sign. The movement deliberately did not do that, and the reason is worth the paragraph.

The asymmetry

A vote for a harmful law costs a repair record roughly four times what it gains the damage record.

Read that twice, because it is not a typo. The same act — voting yes on a listed problem law — moves the Monkey Award up by some amount, and moves the Llama Award down by about four times as much.

The argument for it

The two awards answer different questions, and the questions do not have symmetric evidence requirements.

The Monkey asks how much of this damage is attributable to this person? Attribution should be conservative. One vote among four hundred is a real contribution to an outcome and a small one, and inflating it would let the movement blame individuals for structural failures.

The Llama asks is this record one a citizen can rely on? Reliability is not conservative — it is fragile. A repair record is a claim that this person can be trusted to defend the mechanism when it matters. One vote to dismantle it is strong evidence against that claim, in a way that is not symmetric with how much it proves about their share of the damage.

Put plainly: being unreliable once matters more to a reliability claim than it does to a blame claim. The tables encode that.

What this means in practice

A record can carry a low Monkey Award and a low Llama Award at the same time, and that combination is common and meaningful: this person did not do much harm, and did not do much to help either. An inverted single scale could never express it. Two awards can.

Praise is bound as tightly as blame

Every constraint that governs a damaging finding governs a favourable one. A high Llama Award is a published claim about a living person too, it carries the same sourcing requirements, and it is computed from the same public record with the same published arithmetic.