The Problem With The Butterfly Effect
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- Опубліковано 20 жов 2021
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Created by Henry Reich - Наука та технологія
Insane man completely destroys the State of Kansas by starting multiple tornadoes while ranting about the Butterfly Effect.
🤣😅 this comment made my morning
No, because he canceled the tornado blowing again ;) haha
@@jnnfr216k lmao
This thread is my new favorite for the time being.
And he carelessly disregarded his own advice knowing that his whimsical actions would have world changing consequences.
He must be stopped
Damn. I always assumed his voiceovers were sped up.
Nope, he just talks ridiculously fast.
The Ben Shapiro of Physics
enjoy your tornados! ò.Ó
@@Barwasser Uhhh let's say, hypothetically, for the sake of argument, that Kansas has, shall we call them, tornadoes, and, hypothetically, a butterfly, or what we can assume is a butterfly, beats it's wings. Now, just go with me here, for the sake of argument, let's assume that, among all probability, that small gust might, if you can imagine it, turn into a tornado, or something we might imagine to hypothetically be a tornado. Libs = Owned
Yeah I actually wondered whether my UA-cam was set to 1.25 speed.
I had to play this at 0.75x speed lol
Nah, he totally sped up the video. Probably because he is trying to keep down the video length of a looong rant. (I think, you can also tell from the fast shaking of the handheld camera.)
Damn these drawings are getting more realistic!
🤣🤣
Lmao
+
Damn dude, I came here to say the same
Hand cramps!
Wow. For a guy who started out with lil' stick figures, your drawing has become almost lifelike now!
I know your being sarcastic, but I'll play along.
@@luzellemoller6621 you didnt play along by saying that
@@akilalimayu254 yeah I know right! it's so realistic it doesn't even look like a drawing anymore :D
Almost. Still a bit of the uncanny valley.
This video has all the energy of a guy approaching you at a party and talking at you for an hour, but you can’t find an opportunity to escape the conversation.
Or get a word in edgewise, beyond "Uh huh."
Also, he's speaking at 115% of normal speed xD
but the difference from the party guy is that we all volunteered to watch until the end :-)
@@menseph22 yeah, it was interesting, don’t get me wrong. I clicked for a reason
@@mlok4216 I legit double checked if I wasn't watching the video at a higher speed
So I've been killing butterflies for nothing?!
Nope. You just need to kill many more
Keep it up I'm pretty sure it's gonna lead to you winning the lottery.
r/cursedcomments
probably wise to stop now, else you're causing a butterfly effect to the pollination system... /s
even if it's true. You killing butterflies will also result in butterflies effect
The way I always understood The Butterfly Effect is that one tiny little difference can go on to create 2 differences that go on to create 4 differences, that can go on to create 8 and so on, not exactly to those numbers but the point being that a single point of change can compound into many changes that can lead to a big changes down the line.
Thats exactly what it is...
Your definition is more like "Chain reaction" than Butterfly Effect I guess? More often people call it "Domino effect" but it's more or less the same without make the explanation to long.
@@mistrants2745 yes, but that's not how he described it in the video, so it's relevant. He kept saying "the butterfly causes the tornado" - but he could be describing it as "the butterfly causes things that lead to other things that lead to other things that cause the tornado". I've also heard 'butterfly effect' more to do with time travel than weather, which is another point. We don't have another universe to compare a single difference with. We can never know 100 of the necessary conditions that led to anything specific.
I also think you're missing the point. It's not like the flapping of a butterfly gets magnified to a tornado as you seem to suggest by your geometric sequence.
@@avhuf I didn't mean to say it that way and and I feel thats' the way the video describes it (as magnified) and thus objects to it. I think people should object to the idea that it's magnfied (and this was meant to be my point). It only directly causes the next event, which is another link in a chain. It also doesn't *always* turn into a tornado. We can't know it's necessary for the tornado, but it could be.
The butterfly -> tornado allegory has always been just that, an allegory. Lorentz never meant it to be taken literally. And yeah, he kinda did weather simulations, so that's why it's mostly associated with weather.
I agree and to top that off do you think that Lorenz Factored in how his conceptual framework was misinterpreted in scale, magnitute and basically in the number of times he missed trademark infringement???
Yeah...he is over thinking it. It's not that a butterfly can or will cause it just that something so small and seemingly unthinkable could be key causing it.
It's supposed to make you consider those small seemingly unrelated variables and how they can affect results.
It's not supposed to make you literally consider the possibility of a butterfly causing destructive weather phenomena.
Exactly. Its just an allegory!
Yeah, I was wondering why is he so fixated with a literal tornado lol
yeah, he is completely missing point of something insignificant may have impact on big scale, we cannot predict, because we just do not know enough, or just are plain unable to take everything into account to predict. What that insignificant thing and big scale event is ... is completely insignificant for theory as well
He is going to be very sorry if there happens to be a tornado in Kansas 😂
The mayan prophecy
🤣
There are multiple tornados in Kansas every year.
"Enjoy your tornadoes!"
*Family weeping in the front of their destroyed home*
Don't worry he blew to stop it.
It's not even that clear that "the butterfly effect" is named after the butterfly flapping it's wings. One alternative possibility is that the Lorenz attractor actually resembles a butterfly. Another one is that it comes from the Ray Bradbury story "A Sound of Thunder" where the death of a prehistoric butterfly "causes" noticeable changes in modern times. I personally like the idea that it's named after all three of these things.
I immediately thought of the Bradbury story too.
I thought the sound of thunder was based on the butterfly effect. I have no clue though
Doesn't the idea of the butterfly effect predate Bradbury's story? I always assumed he intentionally made it a butterfly because of that idea.
The most elegant description of chaos I've heard: A chaotic system is any system in which the approximate present does not predict the approximate future.
that's great
i'm pretty sure that's also the real definition
@@MrRyanroberson1 yea it’s literally the Wikipedia description of chaos lol
I think your problem is not really with the butterfly effect. The theory is just fine.
The problem is with the general INTERPRETATION of this theory.
Many people think that these small changes WILL lead to big changes in the future. But usually they don’t. Some changes will lead to big changes, but most of them don’t. The focus is on the UNPREDICTABLE nature of it. So we have absolutely no idea which small change will lead to a big future change.
I like to think about it the other way around, starting from the effect, not from the cause. Think about ANY major thing around you or in the universe. Your birth, the existence of a tree, the orbital distance of the Earth, whatever. For every single such thing, you will find some minor event in the past, which if happens a bit differently, it wouldn’t exist today or would be very different.
The butterfly effect only works in retrospect.
Indeed I think it's his interpretation that's the problem. I have never taken this at face value that a butterfly could actually start a tornado. More that one of many things, like for example a butterfly flapping it's wings could start a tornado. Implying that there are many possible things and in a complex system possibly too many to say for sure which one.
He never said he had a problem with the theory.
Also it's not an arbitrary single change that changes a specific thing, it's almost any change that lead to big general impacts
@@Raykkie Literally the whole video is about that. The title literally says it.
"But usually they don't"? Usually? 😳
How many different timelines have you witnessed?
@@brokenrecord3523You can calculate any of the timelines, if you understand the rules, and have enough computing power.
But you don’t even need that, just understand the basics. The number of butterfly flaps on earth is several orders of magnitudes more than the number of tornadoes. That means most of those flaps can not possibly lead to tornadoes.
I've always taken it to be more of a long-term effect, like how a small change can stack up over time to end up resulting in a larger change. Like maybe it won't diverge that much right away, but the small change can cause a different small change and eventually the changes will start to stack up. In that sense, it's more an example of where time travel paradoxes can come from.
But wouldn't it be better to use "snowball effect"?
Or the straw that broke the camel's back
@@Aldarien No, because a snowball evolves in a predictable, linear way.
Great thread here
True true
I didn't think people were interpreting the butterfly effect with such a narrow lense. Even Jeff Goldblum said it was about unpredictability.
I think he's just trying to make an interesting UA-cam video so soys can be like "DOOOD THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT ISN'T ACTUALLY A VERY IDEAL REPRESENTATION OF CHAOTIC SYSTEMS" and share it with their nerd friends
@@W1zardRyan boy i bet youre fun at parties
@@W1zardRyan lmfao
@@cg1906 If that came off as rude I'll delete the comment, was just thinking that's why he chose to adopt a narrow lense
@@W1zardRyan hm. Okay, maybe you didnt intend it to come off that way, but yes its generally rude to portray people who enjoy and share a harmless video as loud shouting "soys"
I always thought that the "the butterfly effect" is just a simple story to metaphorically explain a chaotic system. Are there any people believe it that a butterfly can cause a hurricane?
That was my understanding too. I see it as a metaphor borne of frustration in that a perturbation as small as a butterfly flapping its wings makes even the most careful predictive model useless when it comes to chaotic systems.
Did you not watch the video at all?? He never said the problem was that people believe it. It just gives the wrong intuition about chaotic systems.
@@user-zb8tq5pr4x his comment isn't contradicting anything said in the video. He's just asking a question
@@justflex6745 In his question he implied that he said something in the video that he never did, therefore it contradicts the video. The premise of the question is false.
Just what I was thinking
I think you've entirely missed the point of the saying by taking it too literally. The point is not that 'a specific butterfly will cause a specific tornado', but rather that small changes over time will add up due to the chaotic nature of things. If we imagine two alternate timelines where the only difference is one butterfly, given enough time these tiny changes will result in events playing out slightly differently, which will cascade into bigger differences between the two timelines.
I think the problem is that that's how it's used in general - people do take it too literally and go "if a specific butterfly flaps its wings in just the right way, it can cause a specific tornado"
@@ericvilas I'm not aware of anyone who takes it that literally.
@@Twas-RightHere it's often used as a metaphor for "small people can cause big changes if they go about it the right way", and the butterfly effect is a really bad thing to use as a metaphor for that.
@@ericvilas yeah, I heard Wendover Productions say that "expanding the Panama canal directly causing a bridge needing to be raised in New Jersey" is an example of the Butterfly Effect, even tho there's clearly a predictable cause and effect
@@Twas-RightHere You must have very educated friends.
Completely off topic:
With my eyes open, I see Henry Reich walking in nature, ranting about the butterfly effect
With my eyes closed it’s a small stick-figure guy on a sheet of paper ranting.
I like both formats 👍🏻
So true. And something about his voice makes it so easy to follow regardless of how fast he is talking. Most UA-camrs would have dragged this video out for 20 minutes.
I really like the whole vlog style walking through the woods. Its cool to feel like you're having a conversation with the voice you've been listening to for the past 8 years
“Enjoy your tornadoes.” If Henry turns out to be a sociopathic murderer the Royal Canadian Mounties will point to that statement as the red flag they ignored.
He might be a tsundere
Regarding our first reason: Weather is a thing everybody can get as a complex system since people deal with it on a daily basis. Far fewer people can conceptualize a chaotic pendulum, let alone a three-body planetary system unless they are somewhat trained in physics. So the "butterfly effect" can at the least be a gateway into the beautiful world of complex systems.
The funny thing here is that while people do deal with weather every day, they don't get how chaotic the system really is. Just think about how most people (me included) get, let's say, angry about weather forecasts for messing things up. “How hard could it be to do a proper forecast?” is kind of a common thing to say/hear. This means they don't get how hard it is, since it's almost impossible to gather all the data at the starting point.
@@Y0d3 I get a particular bee in my bonnet (or perhaps a butterfly?) when people use the wod "supposed to" with regards to the weather. "Bring your umbrella, it's supposed to rain today." "Let's meet in the park, it's supposed to be sunny all day." Nature is not obliged to follow our imperfect models
@@Y0d3 in developing countries, people still feel it hard imagining that weather can be predicted to such accuracy
@@Y0d3 The problem isn't that weather forecasts mess things up, it's that they always do it when it's most troublesome for ME.
Except that linkage of pendulums can be built easily out of a variety of readily available materials, it proposes a means to test it. The butterfly however would require a level of data collection our species as a whole just isn't capable of.
I feel like this video is the first one I've seen, that I can play at 0.75 speed and it feels like someone talking normally :D
Thanks for making me try that. :)
I did exactly this, the man was insane.
lol what, I played at 1.5x, it's fast but understandable.
@@luizzeroxis "understandable"... not normal conversation speed duh
My mind is blown
I think you mean "the butterfly example"
Yeah, seems he took the use of the name of the insect in the same example with a Tornado seriously
You think he means a butterfly litteraly causes a tornado?
He isn't the one mistaken here lol
@@cornlips7247 I didn't say that, but he refers to it as an effect instead of a tornado or a name, which isn't the same thing.
@@sdfrtyhfds he means causality is misrepresented in the butterfly affect, he says that one event doesn't determine the final condition in a chaotic system, but even though butterfly effect sets out to say that "tiny things can completely change the outcome of a chaotic system", the actual theory instead suggests that tiny changes can linearly change the final outcome, he took the example of the butterfly and the tornado to show how a butterfly flapping it's wings isn't sufficient cause for a tornado to happen, yes you can draw the pattern of butterfly flapping the wind before a tornado happening, but that doesn't mean you can predict the linearity, which butterfly effect misleadingly suggests
@@cornlips7247 yeah, he used the example to explain why the effect is misleading, and they think that's literally what he meant
I feel like your "too many butterflies" alternative just demonstrates that you don't understand the point of the original butterfly effect, which is exactly that
Agreed. The Austrian Archduke's driver took a wrong turn, which was what allowed him to be assassinated. This sparked WWI, which destroyed the German economy, driving WWII, which caused chaos in the Middle East and led to the prominence of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and many of the problems we face today. Who would've guessed that if the driver paid more attention to where he was going, the world might be substantially different today? It wasn't a butterfly, but it still illustrates the point.
And before some smart guy chimes in, yes, WWI probably would've started without that event, but it would've happened at a different time, and under different circumstances.
@@GeoffCostanza But this is exactly the point. All that would've happened anyway and I doubt that if the war was delayed a few days you would see massive changes in the chaos that ensued after. In other words, it's misleading to say that the world will be vastly different if the driver didn't take the wrong turn.
Also Henry's point was that there are many butterflies resulting to that outcome. What if the wind was 1mph stronger, and assassin missed the shot? What if the angle of which the vehicle approached didn't give him a clean shot? These are all butterflies as well which led to the event. Not a single wrong turn.
I know these are just examples. You can say he would've died anyway but wouldn't the circumstance be different too?
Really stepped up your animation skills with this one
I think this is just an individual opinion about the first thing that comes to your mind when we say "butterfly effect".
When iam talking about a butterfly effect, i dont think about the weather changing because of the swing of their wings. The first thing i think about is a butterfly you kill 100 million years ago which ends up in the humans never beeing born.
Of course you can't say that this one butterfly leads to any of this. But you say that one tiny change in the past may lead to bigger changes over time which change the world or a scenario like a tornado completly. And this changes over time will happen if you only take one tiny thing out of the equation (for exaymple this butterfly). Its chain-reaction cant be forseen and changes will only increase over time (like the humans who cease to exist)
The butterfly effect is a chaotic chain reaction and i personly love the name because of its simplicity and pictorial nature
I think what he's talking about is how the pop science description of the Butterfly Effect gives many people the wrong idea. The idea is that in a chaotic syste, small change in initial condition can lead to big change in final condition. If someone just heard "The flap of a butterfly's wing can cause a tornado" and didn't look further into it, they probably won't get that idea.
But it cannot be seen without the change it would.. like it's so tremendous small you could ignore it. Like how likely is it compared to all the other things that can happen.. and then you see some changes are like the waves one droplet makes in the ocean... It so small ..all the other things (wind, sun, boats, fish, other waves, birds landing) its effectiveness is so far after the comma it's ignorable
Yes. I think the over all picture is that a butterfly can cause a tornado or prevent it, but the probability of it having an effect at all is close to 0. And for all physicists is anything this close to 0 equal to 0.
I agree with the video. Never liked this Phrase. It’s very misleading.
@@pastusmarcus2249 That's not true. Small, localized perturbations to the Earth's atmosphere do not stay small and localized. Given enough time, they'll totally change the trajectory of the system. The atmosphere is sensitively dependent to the entirety of its initial conditions. If anything changes, eventually everything changes.
What about replacing the butterfly effect with a commute? How much of an effect would leaving at a different time have on your drive? When you get to a stop sign, you arrived just before another car, so you carried on and made it to the stoplight just before it went yellow. If you'd left 2 seconds later, you'd get to that stop sign just after the other car, and then the stop light would have turned red, and everything after it would have a lot of differences on what cars are around you. It's unpredictable because we don't know what change will happen from our departure time. Maybe it's not a perfect analogy since things like stoplights will regulate the input variations, but I think it's one that's easier to understand. People have enough experience with the "groundhog day" trope in media to understand how small changes to inputs can create different outputs.
In chaos theory, a slight perturbation should result in some drastic difference in the future.
Say in your scenario, I leave the house one second earlier. There is this possibility that the one-second-earlier me and the one-second-later me sync at the first traffic light. The rest of our path is going to be exactly the same.
@@phagesaint would it work for a long motorway with no traffic lights? say you cut across a lane 1 second earlier, causing the car behind you to brake, then causing the car behind that to brake and so on, leading to a traffic jam?
"How much of an effect would leaving at a different time have on your drive?"
You would get pruned as a Variant.
I've always thought of the butterfly effect as an fun abstraction of the concept of unpredictable chaotic systems, rather than a belief that a butterfly could literally cause a tornado.
Here’s what the butterfly effect is to me.
A butterfly flaps it’s wings within some visible proximity to me.
I proceed to scream and panic, both wanting to attack it and flee at the same time.
Lepidopterophobia is no joke.
“I do not like the butterfly effect”
*pans to scenic shot of river*
*pans back to Henry*
I don't think the butterfly effect misses the point of chaos, I think you miss the point of the butterfly effect.
The point isn't that the butterfly "caused" the tornado. It's that the world itself is chaotic and highly dependent on initial conditions and one of the biggest ways this can manifest is in weather systems.
The butterfly effect can be used to critique fiction taking place in alternate timelines or involving time travel. Or, more practically, it can be evoked to bring solace to a grieving parent torturing themselves over what they could have done differently to prevent the freak accident that killed their child. The pendulum example doesn't illustrate that.
Brilliant comment! :)
I agree with what I think(?) was Sean Carroll's critique of using the butterfly effect to critique fiction, which is also something that I think is something often missed when talking about chaos that Veritasium highlighted super well: there are tons of patterns we can observe and predictions we can make with chaotic systems actually if look at families of chaotic trajectories (which may have attractors), and in particular we have no reason to think that social structures or certain historical circumstances for example aren't effectively attractors of a chaotic social system. If Hitler didn't come along for example, some other charismatic germanic person would have cobbled together all the popular ideas of that time and place (which is what Hitler did basically, he wore his influences on his sleeve tbh), they very likely would have caused a world war, and they very likely would have lost. Now, certainly some works can go too far in not changing stuff, Bright introduces giant differences in it's world and fadt forwards like, what hundreds of years, and everything is pretty much the same. But in general there is no reason to expect that the vast majority of possible alternate histories with small scale tweaks would be fundamentally different anymore than a butterfly flapping its wings would be the tipping point that creates a tornado.
@@Jordan-zk2wd ok, so hitler was a product, but what about those great personalities that changed the world? if any of them had chosen a different path we all could be in a very different situation. and it doesnt require much, maybe it was just a meeting they had that gave them a great insight and if they couldnt meet they wouldnt have that or it it could be delayed for years.
@@Jordan-zk2wd and ofc the majority would be the same, ofc we are cherry picking, it's about the unknown and what did happened. we can't even be 100% sure without real time travel and testing, but we know it is possible, and that possibility is called the butterfly effect.
if bruce's parents havent been assassinated he hardly would be a vigilante that he is, and probably nothing after that could change his determination either.
But if they have died of disease he could have become a doctor, or something.
thounsands of parents dies every day, the vast majority of their kids don't become batman
Scientifically, you're right and we shouldn't use it that way.
However, in common speech and usage it just means "be wary of unforeseen consequences" and works just fine for that. Indeed, the "too many butterflies effect" would not have the same meaning at all.
Don't want to miss the forest for the trees ;)
that looks like a half life 2 reference
This is taking the butterfly effect too literally though. Seems almost like purposefully missing the point. As a thought experiment, it's simply stating that a minute thing can have a large effect.
i.e, some child leaving their ball in the middle of the road which causes a car to swerve to avoid it, the time it took to swerve the ball means the car hits a red light they otherwise wouldn't hit, meaning they're late to work at their government job, which could lead to a war starting or something
Yes, there are numerous things that could have caused the person to be late to work, but the child is a "butterfly" in this example, if the child didn't leave the ball then they would have gotten to work on time
Yeah pretty stupid, he doesn’t understand or is pretending to be dumb about what the butterfly effect actually means
I know I really shouldn't point it out, but this is one of the rare occasions in which you do not use the adverbial form of "literal", because you are describing "the butterfly effect", not the "taking"
Correct me if I'm wrong, coming across as arrogant is the last thing I want to do.
@@cottonsheep2367 Yeah, nah. That was unnecessary.
@@vincevvn I think one point that Henry is making is that people definitely talk as if the butterfly is "causing" the tornado and I think it's not really that uncommon that people accept that statement as true unexamined. And the disagreement is not about the physics. He's saying (among other things) that describing that as a casual relationship is not a good choice of terms. For the child with the ball above, I wouldn't blame the kids for making the guy late to work. The level of causality they had in the scenario was low. If the lights had been different it the other car had been in a slightly different place or thousands of other things, the guy might not have been late. (But if the kid was blocking the road and refusing to get out of the way for five minutes, then maybe you would attribute blame to the kid even if maybe the guy could have made it if the traffic could have worked out just right.)
Henry is not saying that you, someone who understands physics (and watches Minute Physics), doesn't understand what the butterfly effect really is. He's saying that if you want to explain it to someone who doesn't know and give them the best chance if grasping the central concept, other examples are much better.
@@doctorbobstone I’ve never heard a single person in my life misinterpret the butterfly effect as being literal but maybe that’s just me
I thought I was watcing on 1.25 speed
lol me too
some ppl are just too fast for us casuals. :D
The butterfly effect was named after the butterfly shape of the strange attractor and the effect of a seagull flapping its wings in the first weather simulation where it was discovered that, yes, there is such a thing as sensitive dependence on initial conditions down to 6 or 8 decimal places, which was where the printout truncated.
Do you have a source for that? Because I heard something very different.
No it wasn’t. That came after the coinage of the word
The original meaning was just that a very tiny initial change resulted in very different outcomes.
The term "butterfly effect" was coined by meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who discovered in the 1960's that tiny, butterfly-scale changes to the starting point of his computer weather models resulted in anything from sunny skies to violent storms-with no way to predict in advance what the outcome might be. - Source: American Physical Society
@@cloudpoint0 Again, Lorenz said "seagull" not butterfly.
@@nickalasmontano1496 James Gleick; Chaos: The Making of a New Science
As someone who has near crippling OCD the butterfly effect is one of the things that scares the most. The feeling that anything I do will cause a bad out come, that if I do or don't listen to my ocd, my life will *DRAMATICALLY* change at any given point. So listening to this helps me calm down a bit on that. It's a nice way to remind myself that I am both too insignificant to change everything, but also still significant enough to change many things (just much less significant things than what I worried about)
I have never heard of anyone actually saying that the butterfly effect was literally about butterflies starting tornadoes.
It is just an easy to remember name for chaotic systems. Small changes can cause big differences. They don't have to.
🙋 I have. Guy at a party in college trying to impress some noooooot amused girls by being "deep."
Read Ray Bradbury's Sound of Thunder, it is an example what butterfly effect implies in larger scope.
The motto I always use when thinking about chaotic systems is "approximately correct starting conditions *do not* give approximately correct results"
Great to see you talky walky, Henry.
One thing I noticed is that jump cuts are super obvious when the whole background changes.
I think you are taking the 'butterfly' part too seriously. He went back how many times to save a life and the only way he found how to do it was to end any kind of relationship with the girl. He is essentially the butterfly.
this may be a joke and I'll accept the whoosh in that case but if it's not I just wanted to say that this video talks about the mathematical principle the movie is inspired on, not the movie itself
I kind of hate the conception that tiny event x *caused* large event y. I see it more as rerolling the randomness.
Yes... This is what butterfly effect is. It seems like minute physics misunderstood what the whole point of a butterfly effect
@@seasesh4073 he represented it pretty accurately for misunderstanding it.
@@seasesh4073 what did he misunderstand?
@@fanban2926 he took it too literally. To give a simpler scenario: You remove a SINGLE grain of sand from a beach. After it has been removed, ww3 starts. He considers that the grain of sand DIRECTLY causes ww3, while in reality, the butterfly effect, theorises about chains of events, snowballing into huge changes. In my ridiculous scenario, that grain of sand, would have been eaten by a seagul while eating a chip, that seagul would then have, dunno, died, because of that grain of sand, right over.... a road in russia, causing a car to go into the opposite lane, and crash into putin's car, killing him, then the russians assume it was an assasination done by the US, and launch a nuclear strike, rest is obvious. This is a extremly specific chain of events, which could be prevented by A SINGLE GRAIN OF SAND, BEING MISSING. It's not correct to say that it's the sand that caused the scenario, because you could just as easily say that it was the seagul, or the car, or the chip. There is no one thing/event which you can point to and say "This caused event X".
@@HaartieeTRUE alrighty I get ya
I interpreted the butterfly effect analogy to be the same as your "too many butterflies" analogy. Butterflies are very tiny, and therefore specifying them as a cause puts an emphasis on the fact that there's many many forces affecting the system that are equal to or greater than the force of a single butterfly flapping it's wings, yet removing or adding any single one can cause drastic changes, therefore making it near unpredictable.
I recall a science fiction story where someone goes back in time to the time of the dinosaurs. They inadvertently kill a butterfly. When they return to the present everything had changed. A small change like that had cascaded over the millennium to grossly change the present.
I had read this when I was young and when I first heard the current usage of the term, this was what I thought it meant.
Meanwhile on Kansas News, "A sudden tornado appears and disappears in the middle of the city, leaving meteorologist baffled!"
Just to clarify: " The Butterfly Effect", in chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
He doesn't believe in determinism which is making him think of free will and making him go crazy
I can't happen to notice you've not said anything about weather... hmm...
The other issue I've always had with the stereotypical understanding of the butterfly effect is that people think that the effects of a small change in initial conditions would somehow be extraordinary, when in fact they would be quite ordinary, just different. The butterfly flapping its wings causes a completely "reroll" of (for example) when tornados happen, if you look far enough in the future. Indeed, just about any perturbation does so. But that "reroll" is still according to the same probability distribution, so although different things happen, they're still ordinary things.
I didn't understood it like this at all, lol.
The Butterfly Effect was meant to be an analogy to a property of chaotic systems that a tiny little difference in initial conditions can cause a very different evolution in the long run (sensitive dependence on initial conditions), and not as a cause to why there are tornadoes. Edward Lorenz used it in meteorology because he was a meteorologist, but the idea of sensitive dependence on initial conditions is applied to all chaotic systems (like the chaotic pendulum you've mentioned). And the unpredictability of those systems isn't because of probability, after all they're deterministic systems, it is because of this and other properties.
Source: Chaos, by James Gleick; and other chaotic systems books I've studied in my undergraduate research.
I think you've interpreted it too literally.
EDIT: And the attractor of Lorenz's system kinda looks like a butterfly, so maybe it was from there that he got the idea for the analogy.
I think the butterfly effect is more of a thought experiment on how a minute, seemingly insignificant change can be the tipping point for a major event; rather than a minor change being the sole causality of a major event.
Consider the straw that broke the camel's back. We don't jump to the conclusion that a single piece of straw can rupture the spine of a camel, rather that the tipping point for that rather catastrophic failure can be attributed to a final, minor action.
Butterfly that broke the camel's crocodile tears.
i like the butterfly effect where the guy goes back in time millions of years and accidently kills a butterfly and goes back to the future and everything is changed
I'd like it better if instead the time traveler appeared in low earth orbit, looked around for 5 seconds and then went back to a changed future because their mere presence caused the slightest of changes in the past.
I think the point is that 10,000 years down the line, it’s possible that there could be a hurricane where otherwise there wouldn’t have been, due to that butterfly. But the important part that most people miss is the long time frame - as you said, the situation would have to be set up perfectly for it to happen a short time after the flap.
Great video! The normal framing of the Butterfly Effect has also bugged me for a long time. When I explain this to people my go-to rephrasing reverses the order or analysis, a bit similar to what you do: "if you want to predict if there will be a tornado in Kansas 100 years from now, you need to take into account the wing flaps of butterflies in Minnesota today"
I feel like there is too much focus on the butterfly causing a tornado part. When in reality a the Butterfly Effect was just "A small change can result in large deviations in the future". You said it yourself, people don't go around worrying about Butterflies flapping their wings because we don't see any causality in the Butterfly to Tornado relationship.
"Chaos is about non-linear systems that are sensitive to their initial conditions and are very hard to predict. The Bufferfly Effect kind of makes it seem like we can predict that if the Butterfly flaps it wings a tornado is going to happen. ....[The Butterfly Effect] places to much emphasis on causality and predictability when the whole point in unpredictability"
You claim the Butterfly effect places to much emphasis on predictability, ...why? It uses such an outlandish claim (Butterfly->Tornados) that no one could ever hope to come up with any such predictive models. It's core example is meant to show the two criteria you laid out for chaos, it would be ridiculously hard to predict, and almost certainly highly sensitive to the initial conditions
On a side note, most media utilize the Butterfly Effect to show unintended/unforeseen consequences. I'd argue that also shows a strong belief in the idea that the Butterfly Effect represents chaos in the modern zeitgeist.
There were tornadoes in Missouri today. Close enough.
I've always interpreted the Butterfly Effect as how you described the Too Many Butterflies Effect. I've never thought of the butterfly being either necessary or sufficient, but's more of a "but for." The idea that the tornado wouldn't have happened but for something so small and unrelated seemingly implies that there are so many "but for"s that it's impossible to account for them all. If that makes sense. My head hurts now so I need to go for a walk in the woods.
For every non native english speaker, I recommend to set the video speed to x0.75 to be able to follow his explanations. Especially at 2:18 he begins to speak extremely fast.
For my part, I try to treat it less as a *direct* cause of the chain of events that leads to the storm, but a demonstration of a different *pattern* of events that leads to the storm.
In isolation, sure, a single butterfly's flap won't cause a tornado. But in combination with other factors and variables, that tiny air disturbance can grow into a storm. Or it could not, and another factor might cancel it out. We don't live in a vacuum, after all. Other variables are just as important.
Also, I've been writing a series of stories partially dependent on the idea of multiverse theory and branching paths and partially on the notion that one decision can diverge wildly depending on the choice made, and *now I'm going to have to fix the last thing I wrote because of this HOW DARE YOU BE TIMELY* (not actually mad; just find it funny).
I think a lot of people misunderstand the butterfly effect wrong, and this video has traces of the same misunderstanding, especially in part 2.
A lot of people think of it as a kind of cascade. To take a different example, imagine a small grain of sand falling down a mountainside. It can collide with a slightly bigger grain, which in turn collides with some unstable pebbles and so on, eventually unleashing a rock slide. This seems to essentially be the picture people have in their mind when they think that the butterfly "causes" the tornado. It requires an unstable system near the "tipping point", and the way the video talks about causality would be applicable in this rock slide scenario.
The extraordinary* thing about chaotic systems is that they are in a sense always at a tipping point: _ANY_ arbitrarily small change in the initial conditions _WILL_ eventually lead to a divergence in the final state. This means that if one butterfly flaps its wings once, then after a long enough time, the whole weather pattern on earth would be different than it would have been if it didn't flap. In this sense, not only can a butterfly cause a tornado at some point in the future, but it always will! Of course, as a chaotic system, it is essentially unpredictable, so it is still not possible to make a causal connection between a specific butterfly and a specific tornado.
This fact that it is not possible to make this causal connection becomes even more obvious when you keep the "too many butterflies"-effect in mind :)
(*Once you understand chaos, the fact that any butterfly will cause a tornado doesn't seem so extraordinary anymore, but instead rather natural -- which is perhaps even more extraordinary in its own right)
As you said, a system doesn't need to be crowded to be chaotic. So blaming 'too many butterflies' for the difference between two futures misses that the states could diverge even when the initial states differ only by one butterfly. It would lead into thinking the double pendulum won't be chaotic as there aren't too many changes you could make to the initial state - so there aren't too many butterflies.
I once heard that the butterfly effect actually got its name from a short sci-fi story, I don't remember the author sadly, but basicly a time tourist with the intent of killing a T-Rex with a gun, accidentaly steps on a butterfly, and then discovers all the drastic changes he made in his present hundreds of millions of years later.
There are no mistakes -Master Oogway
From the comments, it's pretty clear people don't understand the Butterfly Effect to begin with. There are probably great videos I could point to, but here's a quick summary: If you have a complex mathematical model of the weather and plug in a value for one of the many variables to be something like 4.36234341, you'll get a model of the weather that you can then extend outward for a period of hours, days, or maybe even a week. But then you re-run the exact same model with all the exact same values except that you leave off the last digit so that it's now 4.36234341. The model gives the same results at first, but then the predictions for the 2nd day are a bit different, and by a week out, the output describes a completely different forecast. That little difference of .00000001? That's the equivalent of the input of a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world. There's nothing significant about that butterfly; it's just that little differences in the beginning can create big differences down the line. Or not (because sometimes they don't). The point is that you can't know specifics.
Thank you!
I've been trying to explain this to some people for years now, but explaining things like that so others can comprehend is no where near a strong point for me.
You've done a much better job than anything I've tried. :D
A better example is how much you can change if you stop for a bit longer in traffic while driving. It would make the car behind you a bit slower, and them cause another one to slow down, etc. Eventually every person in the traffic will reach their destination a few seconds slower. And maybe that won’t change too much, but a single person can miss something. And you caused all of it by hitting the break longer.
For the butterfly effect to even be feasible. It would be the fact that a tiny thing in and of itself causes the greater change. Its more the fact that amongst other existing factors applying to it already. The tiny insignificant force of the butterfly effect was just enough to reach a tipping point.
And for such a specific scenario to occur naturally is astronomically unlikely to basically be impossible. If anything, we don't blame the butterfly for the tornado but the larger factors that we know causes it in the first place. The contributions of the butterfly is negligible to the point of idiotic if you claim that was the cause.
Because by cause you imply its removal will stop the end result. But if you ever want to do that. You always aim for the largest contributing factor which is never the damn butterfly flapping.
The idea of butterfly effect is that a small change "can" possibly cause a "chain" reaction resulting in a big effect, it actually has nothing to do with butterflies or tornados
And it doesnt claim that a small change is the "direct" cause of a big effect
Lets say this:
A,B,C,D together cause F which causes G
F is the direct cause of g, but A or B are also valid indirect causes.
So if we actually live in a deterministic world the butterfly effect can be feasible
People just forget that 99.9999% of the time small fluctuations, like a butterfly flapping its wings, are going to cancel each other out and don't have any effect whatsoever on a bigger scale
How can you say that? The point of chaos theory is that (in a chaotic system) every single detail of the starting condition is important for the final outcome
@@Valeriobrogni in a medium like the air, while it is true that the position and velocity of any given particle is highly dependent on initial conditions and if you were to run a simulation, only slight changes in the initial conditions would lead to totally different states of the system in a fine scale, it doesn't mean that a small fluctuation in the small scale is going to translate into the formation of a large scale structure (like a tornado). For that to happen, you would need a lot of small perturbations to align in a certain way as to allow the small effects to add up and not cancel each other out
@@francescoghizzo that's true, as you said, in the air. Your first comment doesn't talk about air sistems, it's way more general
@@francescoghizzo that's true, as you said, in the air. Your first comment doesn't talk about air sistems, it's way more general
@@Valeriobrogni I was referring to the possibility of a butterfly causing an hurricane
I always felt the "butterfly effect" wasn't SUPPOSED to be a good analogy of a chaotic system, but rather an explanation of what chaos theory IS. I.e. Weather itself is a chaotic system, which means that if you wanted to make predictions about it, you'd need to keep track of uncountable variables including the flap of a (meaning every) random butterfly's wings.
And that's kind of exactly what your "too many butterflies" analogy is. So the problem is maybe not the analogy itself, but the explanation of what it means
Man I wish I could talk this fast this well. I always thought the animations had sped up audio but the dude really talks at this rate!
I'm pretty sure no one talks about causality when they talk about the butterfly effect
The problem is there aren't enough blue butterflys alive
Hearing your voice and seeing your mouth move at the same time will never not be insane after years of watching doodles. Love you so much!!
I feel like this video quality doesn't live up to your own standard from past videos.
My understanding of the butterfly effect seems to be wholly different than yours. It was never that the butterfly causes the tornado, but that the presence of a particular tornado at a particular time could be impacted by something as small as a butterfly. The emphasis was never on predictability but on scalability, and the too many butterflies misses that since the scale remains massive. In fact, if I recall correctly the butterfly effect comes from a sci-fi story about time travel, the point of which was that even the smallest, least significant of changes can lead to a large and quite significant future impact.
Why hate "the Butterfly Effect"??
It's nothing more than a framework for one to grasp the exceedingly and (sometimes) maddeningly complex Chaos theory! The only problem with the butterfly effect is that people take it too seriously and too literally!
Big fan of the new channel, Minute-tasium!!
Love to see more of this type of video.
3:10 "Tornadoes happen without butterflies."
Bold statement. Is there enough evidence to verify this?
Too Many Butterflies is sadly still easy to misconstruct.
Having too many butterflies would seem to imply to the average joe that there's just too many initial states to keep track off, which is kinda of the opposite of the notion that should taught. A chaotic systems is not necessarily a system that has too many initial conditions, but actually too many possible future states. It's basically entropy of information, the more the system changes over time (or grows, as you now have to keep track of more time and therefore information), the more information is required to predict a likely outcome
I think you took the butterfly effect a bit too literally, getting hung up on the specifics of "weather" really misses the point. It's an idea more than a specific scenario, think back through your life and all the little insignificant decisions made which put your life on a completely different path. Such as getting stuck in traffic for a few minutes, which turns into missing an important meeting at work, but then that turns into meeting the love of your life... etc.
Exactly!
@JM Coulon But the butterfly effect isn't trying to define what a chaotic system is, it is just a metaphor. You are just missing the point when you say things like "ignores dampening". Do you want to call it "the butterfly effect but don't forget about everything else that could be dampening the system, also don't assume it is the cause because it might not be"? It's kind of a mouthfull if you ask me.
@JM Coulon but it’s not a bad metaphor. If you took every metaphor literally then all metaphors are bad, that’s why we have things like connotation, and meaning being phrases and words alike
@JM Coulon
"You have a heart of gold"
This is a terrible metaphor because no human really has a heart of gold, or could ever live with one. The logic you're applying makes no sense, like Vash said, if we apply what you think, all metaphors are bad.
It's a metaphor, stop taking it literally, butterfly doesn't mean literally a butterfly. Butterfly means something like a small thing, and tornado a big thing.
@JM Coulon
You're wrong, the heart of gold is definitely the same thing, all you stated could be said about the butterfly effect.
Butterfly exists, tornado exists, they have a meaning when separate, but butterflies don't cause tornadoes, so it is a bad metaphor.
Heart exists, gold exists, they have a meaning when separate, but golden hearts that works inside a human being don't, therefore no one has a heart of gold, so it is a bad metaphor.
Using your logic I can reach the same conclusion with all metaphors, that is why your logic shouldn't apply to metaphors, or metaphors shouldn't exist.
"a small thing can provoke a big thing"
How is this wrong? Please, tell me how small changes in initial conditions cannot cause a widely divergent effect on a system over time? Please tell me how a "butterfly sized change" cannot cause a "tornado sized change"? How is this impossible?
It doesn't matter if it is rare, doesn't matter if it has other factors. See the problem? You're still on the butterfly doesn't matter for weather effects. It is a metaphor! Stop taking it literally!
I really liked the video and the point you made, and I totally agree!
I just have a small piece of criticism, regarding the video itself. The sound was perfect, but the video was always jumping around, there were clips that were less than a second long, making them a bit too jarring... I really liked the format, but there were too many cuts. I'd really like to see more videos like these, but maybe you could try and mitigate this problem next time?
I've always heard the phrase Butterfly Effect being used in time travel as an example of long-term knock-on effects from a seemingly small insignificant change. This is the first time I've heard the tornado chaos theory version of it. The point (at least to my understanding) is not to look at a butterfly today and try to guess the effects it will or won't have down the line, it's to compare a previously "known" version of history versus an altered history where a single butterfly from several years ago is removed from the equation.
For a vastly oversimplified and accelerated example, with that butterfly prematurely killed by a time traveler's careless footstep, it no longer pollinates a specific flower in a specific field. Because that flower is not pollinated (or perhaps pollinated at a later time by a different insect), it does not become the dominant plant in the area. Because it doesn't become the dominant plant in the area, a larger animal that otherwise would have eaten or used the results of that plant doesn't habitate the area. Even if we stop here (side note that this would have taken place over several years), we have a measurable difference from the original timeline (i.e. this field was formerly known for its dense rabbit population) to the new altered timeline (no rabbits in this field, or less so if the process was started later by a different insect).
it can also affect human society through the weather : with a single butterfly missing, the weather will be different, that means every human activity outside is affected , in one case it might rain, making some people to change their plans , so there will be new people who meet each other in one version of the universe and not in the other.
different couple will form, and different people will be born. and after a while every human on the planet will be different than the ones who would have lived without this butterfly.
I mean, the video is entirely right, but does it just attack a strawman? How many people actually interpret the butterfly affect to mean that butterflies are responsible for tornadoes? I've always interpreted it as an example of how a small change now can lead to a big effect later, and it had never even occurred to me to read notions of specific causality into it.
While simpler chaotic systems do a better job of illustrating sensitivity to initial conditions and non-linearity, I’ve never seen a double pendulum or triple planet system in person. I have seen butterflies, and I have seen weather. I think that’s why it’s popular, people feel like they understand the pieces.
1:38 Man starts tornado in The State of Kansas, currently under arrest.
I was really sure I had the video on 1.25 speed. Nice flow of words you have!
Firslty this man talks really really fast. He has to rephrase a lot to get accross what he wants to say, hence the many cuts in the video.
Also this rant is pointless. Everybody knows that the idea of the butterfly and the tornado is hyperbolic.
It's just a metaphor for causality. You missed your key > Are late for work > The was a gasleak and the building exploded and now you live.
It's about small actions that turn out to have had a grave impact. This video is exhausting tbh. He misses the whole point (maybe knowingly) to have an excuse to "replace" something, that doesn't need to be replaced, with a showerthought.
I mean 6 minutes of rambling just to say "You can't credit a butterfly for the tornado, because there are too many variables to keep track of."
Yes, you need to study to get to this conclusion.
I was so confused throughout this video. It's as if he's having a manic episode while having an existential crisis. He's probably going to down the rabbit hole of freewill and not liking it so he has to rant to us.
@@NickwatchesYTtho I know what you mean by that. Also what's the point of using big words to describe something very simple? Do you just want to sound smart by doing so? Because if you want to get a point accross then make it about what you want to say (and make it coherent) instead of how you want to be percieved by others while saying it. Like... we are not dumb, man... Water is wet. Fire is hot. Butterflys don't cause tornados.
@@NickwatchesYTtho I do think there is something up with him lately. I mean, with one of his latest videos, he completly misused/misunderstood space-time dilation for example....
I have to agree “The Butterfly Effect” wasn’t Ashton Kutsher’s best work.
This man talks so fast I actually checked if my playback speed was at the wrong setting. Great video though!
my my understanding (which may be wrong), this is complete misunderstanding of the butterfly effect. it never proposed that a butterfly flapping its wings WILL cause a tornado, just that it CAN cause a tornado. which is basically exactly what you corrected it to as "too many butterfly's".
your new definition is what i always thought it meant
What's with the aspect ratio? You should either go all out with ultrawide or keep it 16:9.
Drink less coffee before recording.
I can't wait for future videos you may do on causality! It's a very interesting topic with very little coverage by educators
I enjoyed the points you made on the specific term of "butterfly effect", although I never took the phrase to have the meanings that you talked about. I started out in computer programming a few decades ago, and weather simulations were a task that programmers thought we *SHOULD* be able to get right, but found out it was much more challenging than expected. And the issue was much more subtle than the need to crunch a *massive* amount of numbers, therefore those issues could not be solved by simply building bigger and faster computers. Even the tiny amount of round-off error caused by printing out intermediate results could make a huge difference in the final result, and those tiny errors (which *did* cause serious variation) were described as "these round-off errors about as significant as a butterfly flapping its wings". I'm not saying that's the official source if the phrase, I'm just saying that's the context where *I* first heard the phrase come up.
However, I can see how the phrase when taken by itself does make it sound like butterflies are causing tornados, and I think this video did a good job of dispelling that notion, and saying *why* that notion doesn't make sense.
This video screams uninformed about the butterfly effect.
Lol.
Dude you totally missed the point of the real meaning of the butterfly effect.
It's not literally a butterfly flapping its wings causes a tornado.
It's that every interaction produces a different outcome, and your interaction with something, no matter how small, creates a ripple of change.
You walking past someone, or stopping to talk to someone, or adjusting something, is an example of the cause of a butterfly effect.
It's a philosophical term meaning your influence, regardless of how small, can change the outcomes and destiny's of many.
A small interaction can create a huge change.
But your video was still fun to watch anyway 🙂.
Just to be completely fair to Edward Lorenz -- who I think introduced the term 'butterfly effect' -- he explicitly begins his 1972 article, titled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings Set Off a Tornado in Brazil?", by saying:
"Lest I appear frivolous in even posing the title question, let alone suggesting it might have an affirmative answer, let me try to place it in proper perspective by offering two propositions.
1. If a single flap of a butterfly’s wing can be instrumental in generating a tornado, so also can all the previous and subsequent flaps of its wings, as can the flaps of the wings of millions of other butterflies, not to mention the activities of innumerable more powerful creatures, including our own species.
2. If the flap of a butterfly’s wings can be instrumental in generating a tornado, it can equally well be instrumental in preventing a tornado."
Which, of course, is exactly the point Henry is making.
Usually, when the butterfly effect is brought up they aren't talking about mathematical chaos theory. Instead, they're talking more about a series of events (usually social).
Example: I drink coffee later in the day. This causes me to go to sleep 30 minutes later than I usually do. This means I am more tired when I wake up and sleep in 5 minutes. I'm 5 minutes late to my car. I hit a red light that I wouldn't of 5 minutes earlier. I'm now late for my job. This means I don't get a promotion that I would've got otherwise. This means that, indirectly, because I drank coffee a little too late, I ran into obstacles I wouldn't have if I didn't and now I just lost $150,000 over 20 years or so (assuming you get a promotion that increases your salary $7500 a year and continue work to 20 years).
I though there would be an argument like this:
There are so many things that can dampen the effect of butterfly flaps, so many that a single butterfly can never cause a tornado. You'll need hordes of butterflies flapping in sync to cause a tornado, just like hordes of molecules do.
The too many butterflies effect sounds like something my therapist told me
Woah you have improved your stickman drawing skills to the max! :D
I’m a hockey fan and not superstitious, but an interesting thing I sometimes consider: if I was at this game instead of watching on tv, would the result have been different? Puck movement seems chaotic and impossible to predict. If I was there, air particles would have moved differently, and it seems plausible to me that the result could be a different bounce of the puck and from there every future outcome has changed, resulting in different goals and essentially a reroll of the whole game. Would love to hear others’ thoughts.
Another problem is that there is other requirements, that are usually forgotten, to say that a system is chaotic