Small decisions that end up causing something huge in the end. I think they are the same.
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They are not quite the same – there are subtle differences.
The domino effect is when one thing causes an effect, and that effect causes another effect, and so on. It’s simply a causal chain. Think: I slept through my alarm > I left later than normal for work > I saw a major car accident > I stopped and saved a guy’s life from the wreck > I got put in the news for it > my friend congratulated me. If any of these steps hadn’t happened, my friend wouldn’t have congratulated me. It’s worth noting that there’s nothing about the domino effect that requires something huge to happen in the end – my friend congratulating me is certainly less impactful than the impact of me saving a guy’s life. It’s just A > B > C > D > so on and so on.
The snowball effect is where one small thing occurs and it gets bigger and bigger over time. Think of a virus. First person gets infected, and they spread it to five other people, and they spread it to five other people, and eventually a LOT of people are infected. The snowball effect is a specific kind of domino effect. The difference between this and the domino effect is twofold: the snowball effect generally is concerned with a causal chain where each event is related to one thing – think the number of people infected by the virus, and secondly the thing specifically gets bigger at each stage. The snowball effect DOES end up causing something huge in the end.
The butterfly effect is specifically when we are doing models. It says that unless you are able to completely model every single thing in your environment with perfect accuracy (an impossibility), eventually one small thing will happen your model doesn’t account for. Since your model doesn’t account for that thing, it also won’t account for any changes that thing causes in other things your model does account for, and the same goes for any differences they cause, and so on and so on, until there are so many differences that your model is useless. It’s a snowball effect, but it’s specific to predictions and modeling.
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