Why I Don’t Believe in the Butterfly Effect, Part 6
Part 6 of 12: Exceptions (And Why They Aren’t Really Exceptions)
Proponents of the butterfly effect often point to examples in history in which something that seemed small turned out to have enormous consequences. And I will admit that that does happen sometimes. In this essay, I will explore several of these examples, but then I will go on to argue that these rare examples do not imply that the butterfly effect is true.
I have compiled seven of these examples, in which something that seemed small turned out to be quite important:
1. The beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a little ironic that I am posting this series of essays in April 2020, because we are currently living under a worldwide crisis that started with something small. Given how much our lives have been disrupted by Covid-19, it is comical to remember how it started. I do not know the exact details, but from what I have read, it sounds like it probably originated at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (a live animal market) in the city of Wuhan in China. Apparently, at least one of the animals (possibly a pangolin) had the virus, and when the butchers cut it up, it ended up on the food. And then someone ate the food and became sick. And then it spread to others. And in less than six months, it has traveled all over the world, killed more than 100,000 people to date, and has led to widespread lockdowns in many countries. That one live animal market really did a lot of damage.
But this phenomenon is not unique to Covid-19. Other pandemics throughout history also probably started thanks to the activities of just a few people, or even just one person. For example, it is thought that the 2014 Ebola pandemic started because a one-year old boy in Guinea ate a bat. And thanks to that, the pandemic killed 11,000 people. Pandemics are cruelly ironic in that way.
2. A security guard starts Watergate. On June 17, 1972, at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC, a 24-year-old security guard named Frank Wills noticed tape on the latches of some of the doors. He removed the tape. A short time later, he happened to return and noticed the tape was back. Suspicious, he called the police, who discovered five men breaking into the DNC’s hotel rooms. It was eventually discovered that President Richard Nixon was involved in these crimes, and he was forced to resign. So a security guard brought down the president.
3. The Patriots’ big break. On April 16, 2000, in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft, with the 199th overall pick, the New England Patriots selected an unheralded, unimpressive quarterback by the name of Tom Brady. But Brady turned out to be much more talented than anyone realized at the time, and he went on to win more games, more playoff games, and more Super Bowl games than anyone else in history. And he transformed the Patriots from a mediocre franchise into perennial Super Bowl contenders. He would ultimately lead the team to six Super Bowl wins — not bad for a sixth-round draft pick.
4. Don’t forget to lock the gate. In 1453, Sultan Mehmed II led the armies of the Ottoman Empire in the Siege of Constantinople. They were gradually battering through the city’s walls. There was one gate within one wall that someone had accidentally left unlocked, allowing the Ottomans through it. Some historians have argued that this was the turning point and that the Ottomans could not have won the battle without this lucky break. The Ottomans’ victory resulted in the Fall of Constantinople, the end of the entire Eastern Roman Empire, and the rise of Islam in Europe.
5. A miracle drug is discovered by accident. In 1928, before leaving for vacation, the microbiologist Alexander Fleming stacked all his cultures of staphylococci on a bench in his unkempt laboratory. By chance, one of them became infected by a fungus. When Fleming returned, he found that the fungus had killed all the staphylococci in its vicinity. Fleming named the fungus’s product “penicillin”, and penicillin became the world’s first antibiotic. It had the power to cure a long list of diseases, and it saved the lives of many millions of people. It’s amazing to think it was discovered by accident.
6. Vasily Arkhipov saves the world. On October 27, 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U. S. Navy detected that there was a Soviet submarine underwater off the coast of Cuba. The Navy began pestering the submarine with little explosives, trying to force it to come to the surface. Having been underwater for days, the men on the submarine did not know whether or not a war had already broken out between the U. S. and the Soviet Union (it had not). The officers on the submarine considered retaliating at the U. S. Navy by launching a nuclear torpedo.
The protocol on this submarine was that if they were going to launch a nuclear torpedo, all three of the commanding officers onboard must unanimously agree to it. The three commanding officers were Valentin Savitsky, Ivan Maslennikov, and Vasily Arkhipov. Savitsky and Maslennikov believed that war must have already broken out, and they wanted to launch the torpedo. But Arkhipov refused, because he (correctly) believed that that would be reckless. An argument broke out, and reportedly, Savitsky was furious at Arkhipov for not approving the launch. But Arkhipov stood his ground, and eventually, Savitsky and Maslennikov gave in, and so they did not launch the torpedo. Instead, they surfaced and traveled back to the Soviet Union.
Throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis, both sides were on high alert for the other side to launch a nuclear attack. If one side launched a nuclear attack, the other side would retaliate with their own nuclear attack, and then it would escalate into an all-out nuclear war, which would have killed hundreds of millions of people.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Vasily Arkhipov saved the world. His refusal to launch the torpedo prevented the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Thank you, Mr. Arkhipov.
7. Any emergency situation. In any emergency situation, such as a mass shooting, a terrorist attack, a fire, an explosion, or an earthquake, the seemingly trivial decisions made by the vulnerable people in the minutes before the disaster strikes will determine whether they live or die. For example, let’s say it’s the morning of September 11, 2001, and let’s say you work on one of the highest floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Let’s say you decide you could use some more coffee, so you take the elevator down to the ground floor and leave the building to go to the coffee shop across the street. Just then, the plane hits the building, and within minutes, all the people who were on your floor are dead. Your little decision to get some coffee saved your life. It is the nature of emergencies that luck determines who lives and who dies.
That concludes my examples. As an aside, I should mention that these seven examples are somewhat similar to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “black swan events”. Taleb defines a black swan event to be an unexpected and very important event that messes up everyone’s predictions about what was going to happen. An example would be the 2008 Financial Crisis. That’s not quite the same thing as what I’m describing here, but it’s a similar concept.
Anyway, these seven examples all involve something that seemed insignificant that was actually extremely significant. And when I watch YouTube videos promoting the butterfly effect, these are the kinds of examples they will use to support their argument. But a closer look reveals that these examples do not prove that the butterfly effect is real, due to the following problems:
a.) These examples are very rare. If you believe that the butterfly effect controls world history, then that would mean that all (or at least most) major events and developments in world history were set into motion by seemingly small events that happened some time earlier. And if you subscribe to the most literal and extreme version of the butterfly effect, then you must think that all seemingly small events are actually extremely important. (That’s how Lorenz saw it.) Thus, a small number of small events that turned out to be big is not sufficient evidence to prove the butterfly effect.
To put it in mathematical terms, these seven examples were moments in time in which the probability of something changed suddenly and drastically. For example, let’s say we made a graph of the probability that the Patriots would win a Super Bowl within five years. As soon as the Patriots decided to draft Tom Brady, that probability skyrocketed (though they didn’t know it yet).
But these sudden changes in probability are very rare. At most moments in time, the probability of something only changes by an extremely small amount (see Part 5). These sorts of sudden changes are very rare.
b.) The influence of an event is limited. It is true that the seemingly small events in the above seven examples caused much larger changes to their sphere of society than was thought at the moment they occurred. But they didn’t change everything in the world*. For example, Frank Wills’s discovery in Watergate caused a sizeable increase in the probability that Nixon would be forced out of office, but it had no significant effect on the probability that the Cold War was going to end anytime soon. The influence of an event is also limited in time: for example, Wills’s discovery probably had an effect on the outcome of the 1976 Presidential Election, but it had no significant effect on the 2096 Presidential Election. Even in these rare examples where a seemingly small event is actually quite significant, it’s not so significant that it affects everything on earth*. An event’s influence dissipates over space and time.
*(except in the case of Vasily Arkhipov)
c.) The significance of these events was due to an unknown fact. Most importantly, the real reason that these events set off such significant results was just because there was an underlying, very important fact in each case that no one was aware of.
We can see this in each of the examples. The butchers in Wuhan didn’t know that they were in contact with a deadly, contagious virus. Frank Wills didn’t know that he was in the midst of a crime that involved the president himself. The Patriots (and the rest of the NFL) didn’t know that Tom Brady was extremely talented. Whoever was in charge of that gate in Constantinople didn’t know that he had left it unlocked and that the Ottomans could get through it. Alexander Fleming didn’t know that his cultures were at risk of being invaded by a fungus that kills bacteria. The three officers on that submarine didn’t know that a full-scale war had not broken out yet. And finally, the people on the morning of 9/11 didn’t know that there was an impending terrorist attack.
The premise of the butterfly effect is that small events cause enormous consequences because one small event causes another event, which causes another, which causes another, and so on, until the whole world has been profoundly changed. But what we see here is that even in the rare instances when something that seems small is actually very big, it’s not because of a cascade of causes and effects; it’s just because there was some extremely important fact that the people involved were not aware of.
d.) These events didn’t accomplish their results all by themselves. Going back to the example of Frank Wills, his discovery may have increased the probability that Nixon would be forced out of office from 50% to 80% (let’s just say), but it didn’t increase it all the way to 100%. There were still other things that needed to be done, and even after the break-in was discovered, it was still possible (though less likely) that Nixon might have finished out his term. Also, with regard to pandemics, some pandemics are contained better than others, which goes to show that the first person to come in contact with the pathogen is not singlehandedly responsible for all the subsequent deaths.
e.) Similar results could have happened through different means. We can see this in the second, fourth, and fifth examples. If Wills hadn’t uncovered the Watergate break-in, someone else might have uncovered it at some future time and still forced Nixon out of office. If the gate had been locked, the Ottomans could have won the battle through other means. And if Fleming’s cultures hadn’t been infected, someone else could have discovered penicillin through some other means. When you take this into account, you can see that these small events are often less significant than they seem, because a similar result could have happened through other means.
f.) Sometimes, the “small” thing isn’t small. Sometimes, proponents of the butterfly effect will point to an example where something that seemed small turned out to be very big, but then when I look it up, it turns out that this “small” thing had not seemed small at all. The people involved were well aware that it was a big deal.
I am thinking specifically of the example of Vasily Arkhipov. I recently watched a YouTube video promoting the butterfly effect which featured the story of Arkhipov. They used it as an example of something that seemed small that turned out to be a very big deal. But that’s not correct, because it did not seem small.
The three Soviet commanding officers on that submarine were all decorated high-ranking military commanders. They knew that the decision they were making was an important one. They knew that they were in the midst of an extremely tense situation. It is true that they probably did not grasp the full importance of it, but on the other hand, they certainly knew that the decision they were making was an important one.
As such, the story of Vasily Arkhipov does not count as an example of something that seemed small that turned out to be a big deal. It did not seem small.
g.) Human beings (myself included) have a tendency to exaggerate. People like to exaggerate things. And people like to exaggerate the importance of individual events. For instance, I first heard about the fourth example from a YouTube video about the butterfly effect. In this video, they acted as if the importance of this one unlocked gate was an established fact. But when I looked it up, I found that it is only some historians who believe that this one unlocked gate was crucial to the Ottomans’ success. And I got the sense that those historians were exaggerating. When someone claims that one small event changed the world forever, we should take that with a grain of salt, keeping in mind that people like to exaggerate things.
That concludes my counterarguments.
You will hear many historians, sci-fi authors, filmmakers, and YouTube hosts argue that a small event in history changed the world forever. More often than not, they are just making the fallacy of assuming that there was only one node in world history, and the point of this series of essays was to argue that that’s not really how the world works (see Part 4).
Sometimes, such as for these seven examples, they may actually be correct. But even in these rare instances, the reason that these seemingly small events were so influential was because of an unknown fact about the world at the time of the event — not because of the butterfly effect. And furthermore, even when they’re right, the people who make these claims are probably exaggerating the importance of these small events, because people (myself included) like to exaggerate things.
Other parts of this series:
Part 2: The Butterfly Effect in Pop Culture
Part 3: The Wrong Way to Disprove It
Part 5: Responding to Arguments in Favor of the Butterfly Effect
Part 7: Three Wrong Ways to Discuss Alternative History
Part 8: The Right Way to Discuss Alternative History
Part 9: How I Would Interpret Lorenz’s Observations
Part 10: The Butterfly Effect and the Slippery Slope
