The Butterfly Effect
Growing Meta #4
Hello from Riyadh - welcome to Growing Meta!
I will be sharing the most insightful bites of scholarly conclusions and discoveries that augment our understanding of knowledge & complexities. This newsletter will slowly climb the mountain range of meta to discover what are the best lenses that view all other lenses?
The Butterfly Effect
People who studied Chaos Theory, or who saw Kutcher’s 2004 movie are familiar with that concept. It’s the idea that a small change in the system, can have drastic outcomes.
“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”
Of course, no body saw a butterfly cause a hurricane. It’s just speculation — an example to illustrate how sensitive a system is to initial conditions (i.e. any tiny, really tiny, difference in the system could dictate huge outcomes.)
Here is professor Lorentz, who gave a name to this phenomenon. In 1961, he noted the importance of initial conditions to the present shape of any system. He discussed the phenomena from two angles: a practical one, where he demonstrated the problem of predicting weather, and a philosophical one: can we ever pin-point causes of present conditions?
The two lines grow different after a while, just because of a minor change in the experiment’s initial settings. The butterfly effect is one of these complex concepts that caught popularity and influenced many works in pop culture. Dizikes wrote a critical Boston Globe article in 2008 to argue how movies like ‘The Butterfly Effect’ is getting the concept of butterfly effects wrong:
“The larger meaning of the butterfly effect is not that we can readily track such connections, but that we can't. To claim a butterfly's wings can cause a storm, after all, is to raise the question: How can we definitively say what caused any storm, if it could be something as slight as a butterfly? Lorenz's work gives us a fresh way to think about cause and effect, but does not offer easy answers.”
Why then should we bother with thinking about butterflies fluttering if we can’t determine they cause anything?
We can think forwards.
These researchers are trying to make indoor position tracking more accurate through Wi-Fi ‘fingerprinting’. That means that when you use the wi-fi, your exact position within the building can be calculated.
To do that, they have to have ‘ground truth’ values of signals. But it’s impractical because, and they demonstrate, any slight change in calculating an initial ground truth value gives an entirely different location value. (They’re solving this, but thinking in terms of butterfly-effects helped them pinpoint a huge fallback.)
They calculate 'ground truth' values by placing phones on these tables and connecting them to Wi-Fi. Yes you're being tracked even indoors, they can even tell you which way you were facing.Butterfly effects are an important concept. It haunts deterministic attempts at understanding consequences and the future (determinists are people who argue that we can calculate the future with accuracy if we had all information). But it’s a thought-avalanching one. A lot think that Mohamed Bouazizi setting fire on himself in 2010 is a butterfly effect that caused the Arab Spring (and a lot more), but what was the butterfly effect causing that? Where does the chain stop? What can we learn?
Meta Shares
I love listening to Santa Fe Institute (SFI)’s Podcast - great conversations every week that weave both theory and practice.
What should we be worried about? - 154 intellects share their answers in internet salon Edge.