Whats the difference between the butterfly effect, the snowball effect, and the domino effect?

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Edit: ok you guys, thanks for everything and all the explanations. you helped me.

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5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

butterfly: seemingly unrelated driver of events undergoes unanticipated amplification/muliplication, snowball: related events add their cumulative weight to an initiating event, domino: multiple events directly attributable to an initial event

Anonymous 0 Comments

All of these are cause and effect type of scenarios.

The main difference is that.

Butterfly effect – the cause leads to some unknown or unpredictable huge effect that’s hard to link to the original cause.

Snowball effect – the cause leads to some effect that grows and grows in proportion until the effect is so huge and devastating.

Domino effect – the cause leads to some effect, which becomes the cause of some another effect, and so on.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The butterfly effect is the idea that in certain systems, a small change in an input variable can lead to huge changes in the output. Its name comes from the idea that a hurricane might not have happened if a butterfly three weeks earlier had flapped its wings one fewer times.

The snowball effect is the idea that the output of a system increases the value of future outputs – like a snowball: The bigger a snowball is, the more extra snow it accumulates as you roll it around your garden.

The domino effect represents simple chain reactions – do one thing and a series of events will cause another thing to happen. In speech, it’s often used to imply that the series of events is inevitable once the first domino has been triggered.

Anonymous 0 Comments

* domino – one thing lets to another thing that leads to another thing
* snowball – a thing is put into motion, gets bigger and faster until it longer can be controlled
* butterfly – one thing has a subtle and unpredictable influence on another seemingly unrelated thing

The first to are pretty straightforward, but the butterfly effect is almost always misused. The idea comes from chaos theory, the notion a butterfly can flap its wings, and through the chaotic and unpredictable effect it has on the atmosphere, it can tip the balance between a hurricane halfway around the world from forming.

Unfortunately, most of the time “butterfly effect” means “shit happens so I am not responsible for this fuckup caused by my negligence.”

Anonymous 0 Comments

* To use currents as an example:
* Spread of Corona Virus is an example of snowball effect
* One person infects 2 to 3 other people.
* The cause of the spread is very obvious.
* It can also model butterfly effect
* Someone coming down with corona virus misses work as an investigator of some kind and doesn’t notice the connection between two people in a case they are working and potentially doesn’t catch a bad guy.
* Ultimately one thing is related to the other but nearly impossible to see the connection objectively.
* Not really a good example of domino effect.