[Guest]

Do you belive in the butterfly effect?

The Butterfly Effect:

They say if a butterfly were to flap its wings in japan it could cause a hurricane in the united states.

Moral:

One little change can make a big difference.

i believe in the butterfly effect

[Guest]

The variables of cause are too great to determine that the single butterfly caused the change and could never be proven. So, no. I believe that actions can cause change but the scale is too great to assume that this is possible.

If it were possible it'd be pretty tight to understand the movements through space to control the world's climate half way around the world. Like take your hand and fling it twice, make a fist and thrust forward, then open it up and pull air back and it would cause a tree to fall 1,000 miles away because of wind.

Maybe later in life.. but not now.

[akaslickster]

Do you belive in the butterfly effect?

The Butterfly Effect:

They say if a butterfly were to flap its wings in japan it could cause a hurricane in the united states. Hi Thuchris, how are you. I'm now curious as to whom (they) in particular are. They say the global warming is on but thats the meteorologists. I forgot what one calls a butterfly expert.

Moral:

One little change can make a big difference.

i believe in the butterfly effect

I don't want to believe in things which cannot be proven or seem 100% impossible. Also why is it called butterfly instead of flutterfly??????????????????????????????????????????????????ha ha ha

Edited May 17, 2008 by akaslickster

[Guest]

Well, it really depends on whether you can actually prove that a single small event can lead to a huge change on some other part of the world at a later time.

Such instances actually happen everyday in life. In fact, every single moment or decision could potentially be a life-altering event.

This is depicted very well in the movie 'Sliding Doors' where a woman just misses catching a subway train. From then on, her life splits into 2 realities (one where she misses the train and one where she catches it). The two realties then take her through completely different scenarios altering the rest of her life.

Let us actually try to form a imaginary chain of events that could start in the flapping of a butterfly's wings and lead to a hurricane (ignoring countless other variable factors):

Lets say: A man is just leaving for work and pauses to watch a butterfly in his garden that has just started to flap its wings on a nearby flower. He watches the butterfly for 10 seconds and thereby gets delayed. If the butterfly hadn't flapped its wings, he would not have noticed it. This 10 second delay causes him to get stop at a traffic signal (that he would have crossed otherwise) and gets delayed by a full minute which in turn causes him to miss the train and take the next one after 10 min. And so on... (you get the idea)... Eventually, the delays add up causing a full-day delay to the departure of a ship taking cargo around the world to some island in the pacific. The exhaust from the ship causes a slight imbalance in the atmospheric thermals that in turn causes some already unstable mass of air to start developing into a hurricane that eventually hits the US...

With this above scenrio, we could argue that had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the hurricane would not have happened. But we can never prove either possibility.

anything in this world (as small as possible) can potentially cause a global change. For e.g.: A new microbe that appears and eventually wipes out half the world's population...

But we can never prove this. So, yes, I say. The butterfly effect does exist. Only we can never prove or disprove it... Just like God !!

[Guest]

I'd say it hardly requires proof. The butterfly effect is more of an observation than a theory. Over time, the effects of one event spread out ever more widely. That is pretty self-evident I think. A butterfly flapping its wings doesn't exactly cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, but the butterfly's choice to flap its wings or not could be the deciding factor of whether a hurricane later happens. It's unlikely to be, but it could be. It's like in the saying "the straw that broke the donkey's back". One straw will not break a donkey's back on its own but keep adding straw to the load and eventually it reaches the point where it will. In the end one piece of straw makes the difference. The butterfly effect is usually used in reference to chaotic systems, where small differences in initial conditions tend to grow over time into big ones. The existence of such systems is not really in question, they are a well understood phenomenon. Weather is one such system. You will never see weather reports for next year (or even next month with any degree of accuracy). That's because it's chaotic. No matter how accurately you know its present state you still could not predict it very far.

[Guest]

Have you ever seen the CSI episode titled Chaos Theory? If not, the case goes something like this:

A woman is missing from her college dorm room the day she was scheduled to go on a trip. There is no evidence of foul play. Eventually, the CSIs find her, sealed in a compacted block of trash. As the case goes on they realize she had been cleaning out her dorm in preparation for the trip, and had taken her trash to the faulty trash dispenser chute. The spring shut on her and her trashcan fell into the dumpster. She went down to retrieve it, and while she was standing behind the dumpster grabbing the trashcan, a car came by and accidentally rammed the dumpster, cutting her liver and spleen in two. She fell forward into the dumpster as the internal bleeding slowly killed her, and as the garbage truck was scheduled to come by that day, she was dumped into the back and thus taken to the trash compacting station, where she was finally sealed within the block.

Now, at the end, Grissom (lead CSI) explains Chaos Theory, saying that if she hadn't taken out her trash, she wouldn't have died. So the dorm room trashcan lead to her being compacted in a giant trash-block. I believe it's one of my favorite episodes - in fact, all the episodes with a theory are my favorite. But whatever. This episode is a perfect example of Chaos Theory.

To answer your original question, I do believe in Chaos Theory.

[Guest]

Sorry...let me refrase that.

Do you believe the moral?

that one little change in the world could have a big or even massive effect

[itachi-san]

Do you belive in the butterfly effect?

The Butterfly Effect:

They say if a butterfly were to flap its wings in japan it could cause a hurricane in the united states.

Moral:

One little change can make a big difference.

i believe in the butterfly effect

I think you should clarify the Butterfly Effect. The cause/effect relationship is not direct. Rather, the butterfly's cause generates a lengthy series of events that eventually lead up to a hurricane.

Basically, I agree with the idea, but I think it's a silly thing to say. There are an innumerable amount of causes that make up a hurricane. If you dig deep and long enough you can find anything.

[Guest]

Sorry...let me refrase that.

Do you believe the moral?

that one little change in the world could have a big or even massive effect

There's a useful moral idea there. Every small action you take has at least the potential to contribute to large-scale consequences. This is particularly true of human interaction. Simply choosing to show a little respect for someone can make a huge difference if it comes at a critical moment. All the events that shape our lives are influenced by trivial (seemingly inconsequential) causes.

[unreality]

Yeah, like that commercial where the guy does a good thing, and then that person does a good thing, etc, etc, and it comes back to the original person eventually- after all, we can be connected to anyone within 6 links ("6 degrees"), and most people can be connected with 2 or 3 or 4.

Like, smiling at someone could save their life if they were depressed, kinda like what octopuppy said about the "critical moment". Know what I mean?

A more worldly view of this:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/swarms/miller-text

From the end of the article:

That's the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence. Whether we're talking about ants, bees, pigeons, or caribou, the ingredients of smart group behavior—decentralized control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb—add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.

"We don't even know yet what else we can do with this," says Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We're not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. We can't control an emergent phenomenon like traffic by putting stop signs and lights everywhere. But the idea of shaping traffic as a self-organizing system, that's very exciting."

Social and political groups have already adopted crude swarm tactics. During mass protests eight years ago in Seattle, anti-globalization activists used mobile communications devices to spread news quickly about police movements, turning an otherwise unruly crowd into a "smart mob" that was able to disperse and re-form like a school of fish.

The biggest changes may be on the Internet. Consider the way Google uses group smarts to find what you're looking for. When you type in a search query, Google surveys billions of Web pages on its index servers to identify the most relevant ones. It then ranks them by the number of pages that link to them, counting links as votes (the most popular sites get weighted votes, since they're more likely to be reliable). The pages that receive the most votes are listed first in the search results. In this way, Google says, it "uses the collective intelligence of the Web to determine a page's importance."

Wikipedia, a free collaborative encyclopedia, has also proved to be a big success, with millions of articles in more than 200 languages about everything under the sun, each of which can be contributed by anyone or edited by anyone. "It's now possible for huge numbers of people to think together in ways we never imagined a few decades ago," says Thomas Malone of MIT's new Center for Collective Intelligence. "No single person knows everything that's needed to deal with problems we face as a society, such as health care or climate change, but collectively we know far more than we've been able to tap so far."

Such thoughts underline an important truth about collective intelligence: Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it's made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part. For those of us who sometimes wonder if it's really worth recycling that extra bottle to lighten our impact on the planet, the bottom line is that our actions matter, even if we don't see how.

Think about a honeybee as she walks around inside the hive. If a cold wind hits the hive, she'll shiver to generate heat and, in the process, help to warm the nearby brood. She has no idea that hundreds of workers in other parts of the hive are doing the same thing at the same time to the benefit of the next generation.

"A honeybee never sees the big picture any more than you or I do," says Thomas Seeley, the bee expert. "None of us knows what society as a whole needs, but we look around and say, oh, they need someone to volunteer at school, or mow the church lawn, or help in a political campaign."

If you're looking for a role model in a world of complexity, you could do worse than to imitate a bee.

Edited May 18, 2008 by unreality

[itachi-san]

Yeah, like that commercial where the guy does a good thing, and then that person does a good thing, etc, etc, and it comes back to the original person eventually- after all, we can be connected to anyone within 6 links ("6 degrees"), and most people can be connected with 2 or 3 or 4.

What are the criteria for the degrees? If the second degree is that we live on Earth (breath air, have bones, etc...) for example, then we can all be connected with 2 degrees.

[unreality]

It's like immediate people knowing... you can't say you're connected once to every person in your school- only if you KNOW them all, every single one. But you can probably connect to most people in your local community with 1, 2 or 3.

I can connect myself with most of Hollywood with 4, and 5 at the max

I'm connected to all geologists and seismologists with 2 & 3 connections, even though I have little interest in that field

I'm connected to Bill Clinton I think by only 4 degrees... my dad's colleague has a son that was his speechwriter

and since you are connected to me (I would think so... over the internet it's more complicated, probably) you're connected to all of those +1, thru me, though more likely you are connected to all of those people in other ways too

[unreality]

wikipeda article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation