The Butterfly Effect has no meaning neither practical applications outside of the context of certain types of equations and the complexity context.
Actually its not right of most of life’s situations: if you have 2 instead of 1 coffee today you’ll still be the same person tomorrow. That’s because you are a complex system yourself, under an stable equilibrium, which will absorb and minimize even major environmental circumstances.
The effect implies the Universe is completely inpredictable because all tiny events each readesign the destiny of the Universe. However in accord with our intuition the effect is false.
Complex adaptive systems are highly predictable even under random disturbances. It is possible for a small effecto to have a large impact, but this is the expception rather than the standard.
The less cybernetically structured a system is the more exposed is to the “effect” (eg weather), but real live is full of cibernetically structured systems.
Comments by Luis G de la Fuente