butterfly effect

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Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, butterfly effect, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, experimental subject, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, power law, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, trade route

In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York. When the explorers of chaos began to think back on the genealogy of their new science, they found many intellectual trails from the past. But one stood out clearly. For the young physicists and mathematicians leading the revolution, a starting point was the Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly Effect Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?

The repetition disappeared. The Butterfly Effect was no accident; it was necessary. Suppose small perturbations remained small, he reasoned, instead of cascading upward through the system. Then when the weather came arbitrarily close to a state it had passed through before, it would stay arbitrarily close to the patterns that followed. For practical purposes, the cycles would be predictable—and eventually uninteresting. To produce the rich repertoire of real earthly weather, the beautiful multiplicity of it, you could hardly wish for anything better than a Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly Effect acquired a technical name: sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine.” By then the Butterfly Effect was well on its way to becoming a pop-culture cliché: inspiring at least two movies, an entry in Bartlett’s Quotations, a music video, and a thousand Web sites and blogs. (Only the place names keep changing: the butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, Peru, China, California, Tahiti, and South America, and the rain/hurricane/tornado/storm arrives in Texas, Florida, New York, Nebraska, Kansas, and Central Park.) After the big hurricanes of 2006, Physics Today published an article titled “Battling the Butterfly Effect,” whimsically blaming butterflies in battalions: “Visions of Lepidoptera terrorist training camps spring suddenly to mind.”


pages: 250 words: 79,360

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It by Erica Thompson

Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, butterfly effect, carbon tax, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Emanuel Derman, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, hindcast, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, implied volatility, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kim Stanley Robinson, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, negative emissions, paperclip maximiser, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, random walk, risk tolerance, selection bias, self-driving car, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Great Resignation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trolley problem, value at risk, volatility smile, Y2K

This is partly why the exponential increase in computing power has resulted in only linear improvements to the lead time of useful weather forecasts. The problems caused by the Butterfly Effect have an obvious solution. Just measure the initial conditions more accurately and you’ll get a more accurate forecast. As the importance of initialisation has become more and more clear, weather-observing systems have been massively improved over the last century, now assimilating near-real-time data from satellites, aeroplanes, ships, weather stations, radiosonde balloons, radar systems and more. There is also a slightly less obvious solution to the Butterfly Effect, one that has prompted huge changes in the way that weather forecasts are made and communicated.

But for complex and nonlinear systems like the weather, small model errors can instead result in large prediction errors even over short timescales. This is the Hawkmoth Effect. When the Butterfly Effect strikes, our forecasts start off accurate and then become imprecise, but they do not become misleading. When the Hawkmoth Effect strikes, our forecasts start off accurate, then they can become misleading (see Figure 3). Imprecision is not a sin, and it need not cause bad decisions as long as we know to expect it. When a forecast is misleading, however, it can cause us to do the wrong thing in mistaken expectation that we know what will happen. The Hawkmoth Effect is analogous to the Butterfly Effect, but rather than sensitivity to the initial condition, it describes sensitivity to the model structure.

The initial conditions were real-world measurements and there were only a finite number of dimensions in which they might be wrong: the position of a basketball can only be incorrect by being too far up, down, left, right, forward and/or back. We can systematically try a range of possibilities that encompass the actual position of the ball. That’s why the Butterfly Effect is solvable: we can know that the true outcome is somewhere within the range of predicted outcomes. Figure 3: The solution to the Butterfly Effect is to run a perfect model with lots of different initial conditions (solid lines). The fuzzy circle on the left shows the range of measurement uncertainty around the correct initial condition, and the fuzzy circle at top right shows the resulting imprecise forecast.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

He illustrated this concept by saying that the path of a tornado could be affected by a butterfly flapping its wings weeks before, sending air particles on a slightly different path than they would have otherwise traveled, which then gets amplified over time and ultimately results in a different path for the tornado. This metaphor has been popularized in many forms of entertainment, including by Jeff Goldblum’s character in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park and in the 2004 movie The Butterfly Effect, starring Ashton Kutcher. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT The fact that you are surrounded by chaotic systems is a key reason why adaptability is so important to your success. While it is a good idea to plan ahead, you cannot accurately predict the circumstances you will face. No one plans to lose their spouse at a young age, or to graduate from college during an economic downturn.

We’re sure you can point to times in your history when a small change led to a big effect in your life. It’s the “what if” game. What if you hadn’t gone to that event that led to meeting your spouse? What if you had moved into that other apartment? What if you had struck up a relationship with a different teacher or mentor? That’s the butterfly effect at the most personal level. One way to more systematically take advantage of the butterfly effect is using the super model of luck surface area, coined by entrepreneur Jason Roberts. You may recall from geometry that the surface area of an object is how much area the surface of an object covers. In the same way that it is a lot easier to catch a fish if you cast a wide net, your personal luck surface area will increase as you interact with more people in more diverse situations.

A&P, 70 absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, 167 A/B testing, 136 Accidental Empires (Cringley), 253 accountability, 275 acne, 169–71 activation energy, 112–13 actor-observer bias (self-serving bias), 21, 272 Adams, John, 222 adaptability, 121, 129 ad hominem, 226 adverse selection, 46–47 advertising, 103–4, 120, 262 advisers, 44, 45, 296 Affordable Care Act (ACA), 46, 47 Afghanistan, 54, 243 agent, 44–45 aggregation, 205 aggression, obnoxious, 264 agreeableness, 250 AIDS, 233 Airbnb, 276, 288, 292 air pollution, 41 air travel, 53–54 Aldi, 70 Alexander, Christopher, 92 algorithms, 94, 97 Allen, David, 76 all-nighter, 83 alpha, 161, 182 al-Qaeda, 52, 54 alternative hypothesis, 163, 164, 166, 167 altruism, effective, 80 alumni, 119 Amazon, 61, 70, 95–96, 283, 290, 300 American Revolution, 221–22, 239, 240 American Statistical Association, 168 Amway, 217 analysis paralysis, 60–62, 93 anchoring, 14–15, 30, 199 anecdotal evidence, 133, 139, 146 antibiotics, 37, 47–49 Antifragile (Taleb), 2, 105 antifragility, 2–3, 31–33 anti-patterns, 93 AOL, 106 Apollo 13, 4 appeasement, 237 Apple, 103, 104, 231, 241, 258, 289–91, 305, 309 iPad, 290 iPod, 296–97 Newton, 290 approval ratings, 152–54, 158 arbitrage, 282–83 Archilochus, 254 Archimedes, 78 arguing from first principles, 4–7, 31, 207 Ariely, Dan, 14, 222–23 arithmetic, ix–x, 23–24, 30, 178 arms races, 209–12, 214 Ashley Madison, 229 Associated Press (AP), 306 asymmetric information, 45–47 atomic bomb, see nuclear weapons Atwood, Jeff, 253 authority, 219–20, 226 automation, 95, 310 availability bias, 15–18, 30, 33, 300 average, 146, 187 Avon, 217 Aztecs, 243–44 babies, 198, 279 sleep and, 131–32 babysitters, 222 backfire effect, 26 back-of-the-envelope calculation, 299 bacteria, 47–49, 295 bait and switch, 228, 229 bandwagon effect, 202 barriers to entry and barriers to exit, 305 baseball, 83, 145–46, 289 base rate, 157, 159, 160 base rate fallacy, 157, 158, 170 BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement), 77 Battle of Heraclea, 239 Battle of Tsushima, 241 Bayes’ theorem and Bayesian statistics, 157–60 beachhead, 300–301 Beatles, 105 Beautiful Mind, A, 213 beliefs, 103, 107 bell curve (normal distribution), 150–52, 153, 163–66, 191 Bell Labs, 89 benefit of the doubt, 20 benefits: cost-benefit analysis, 177–86, 189, 194 eliminating, 224 net, 181–82, 184 Berlin, Isaiah, 254 Bernoulli distribution, 152 best practices, 92 beta, 162, 182 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 144 Bezos, Jeff, 61–62, 286–87 bias, 3, 139 availability, 15–18, 30, 33, 300 confirmation, 26–28, 33, 103, 159 disconfirmation, 27 groupthink, 201–3 hidden, 139–43 hindsight, 271–72 nonresponse, 140, 142, 143 observer-expectancy, 136, 139 optimistic probability, 33 present, 85, 87, 93, 113 publication, 170, 173 response, 142, 143 selection, 139–40, 143, 170 self-serving, 21, 272 survivorship, 140–43, 170, 272 Big Short, The (Lewis), 289 bike-shedding, 75, 93 Bird, Larry, 246 birth lottery, 21–22, 69 black-and-white thinking, 126–28, 168, 272 black boxes, 94–95 Black Flags rebellion, 276 blackouts, electric, 120 black swan events, 190–91, 193 Blank, Steve, 294 bleeding them dry, 239 blinded experiments, 136 Blockbuster, 106 blowback, 54 Boaty McBoatface, RSS, 35 body mass index (BMI), 137 body temperature, 146–50 boiling frog, 55, 56, 58, 60 bonds, 180, 184 Bonne, Rose, 58 Boot, Max, 239 boots on the ground, 279 Boston Common, 36–38, 42 Boyd, John, 294 Bradley, Bill, 248 brainstorming, 201–3 Brandeis, Louis, 307 breast cancer, 156–57, 160–61 Breathalyzer tests, 157–58, 160 Brexit, 206, 305 bright spots, 300 bring in reinforcements, 279 British Medical Journal (BMJ), 136–37 broken windows theory, 235–36 Broderick, Matthew, 230 Brody, William, 290–91 Brookings Institution, 306 brute force solution, 93, 97 Bryson, Bill, 50 budget, 38, 74–75, 81, 95, 113 national, 75–76 Buffett, Warren, viii, 69, 286, 302, 317, 318 burning bridges, 243 burnout, 82, 83 Burns, Robert, 49 burn the boats, 244 Bush, George H. W., 104 business case, 207 butterfly effect, 121, 122, 125, 201 Butterfly Effect, The, 121 Butterworth, Brian, x buyout, leveraged, 79 bystander effect, 259 cable television, 69, 100, 106 Caesar, Julius, 244 calculus, 291 call your bluff, 238 cameras, 302–3, 308–10 campaign finance reform, 110 Campbell, Donald T., 49–50 Campbell’s law, 49–50 cancer: breast, 156–57, 160–61 clusters of, 145 lung, 133–34, 137 cap-and-trade systems, 42–43 capital, cost of, 76, 77, 179, 182 careers, 300–301 decisions about, 5–6, 57, 175–77, 201, 207, 296 design patterns and, 93 entry barriers and, 305 licensing and, 306–7 Carfax, 46 Cargill, Tom, 89 cargo cults, 315–16 caring personally, 263–64 car market, 46–47 Carrey, Jim, 229 carrot-and-stick model, 232 cascading failures, 120, 192 casinos, 220, 226 cast a wide net, 122 catalyst, 112–13, 115, 119 Catherine II, Empress, 228 causal loop diagrams, 192–93 causation, correlation and, 134, 135 cellphones, 116–17 center of gravity, 112 central limit theorem, 152–53, 163 central tendency, 147 chain reaction, viii, 114, 120 Challenger, 31–33 challenging directly, 263–64 change, 100–101, 112–13, 129 resistance to, 110–11 chaos, 124 balance between order and, 128 chaos theory, 121 chaotic systems, 120–21, 124, 125 Chatelier’s principle, 193–94 cheating, 50 Chekhov, Anton, 124 chess, 242 chilling effect, 52–54 China, 231, 276 choice, 62 paradox of, 62–63 Christensen, Clayton, 296, 297, 310 Cialdini, Robert, 215–17, 219–21 circle of competence, 317–18 climate change, 42, 55, 56, 104, 105, 183, 192 Clinton, Hillary, 70, 97 clustering illusion, 144–45 CNN, 220 Coase, Ronald, 42 Coase theorem, 42–43 cobra effect, 50–52 Coca-Cola, 305 cognitive dissonance, 27–29, 216 coin flips, 143–44, 154–55, 158–59 Cold War, 209, 235 collateral damage, 53–54, 231 collective intelligence, 205 collectivist versus individualist, in organizational culture, 274 college, 209–10 choice of, 58–60 rankings of, 50, 137 Collins, Jim, 109, 254 commandos, in organizations and projects, 253–54 commitment, 87–88 escalation of, 91 influence model of, 216, 220 commodities, 283 commons, 36–38, 43 Common Sense (Paine), 221–22 communication, high-context and low-context, 273–74 competence, circle of, 317–18 competition: and crossing the chasm, 312 moats and, 302–5 perfect, 283 regulatory capture and, 305 sustainable competitive advantage, 283, 285 complexity, complex systems, 185–86, 192, 194 diagrams and, 192–93 simulations and, 192–94 compound interest, 69, 85 Concorde fallacy, 91 conditional probability, 156 Confederate leaders, 113 confidence intervals, 154–56, 159 confidence level, 154, 155, 161 confirmation bias, 26–28, 33, 103, 159 conflict, 209, 226 arms races, 209–12, 214 game theory and, see game theory confounding factor, 134–35, 139 conjunction fallacy, 9–10 conscientiousness, 250 consensus, 202 consensus-contrarian matrix, 285–86, 290 consequence-conviction matrix, 265–66 consequences, 35 unintended, 35–36, 53–55, 57, 64–65, 192, 232 containment, 233, 237 contests, 35–36 context-switching, 71, 74 continental drift, 24–25, 289 contrarian-consensus matrix, 285–86, 290 Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, The (Sample), 28 control group, 136 conventional wisdom, 5 convergent thinking, 203 conviction-consequence matrix, 265–66 cooperation, 215, 226 tit-for-tat, 214–15 correlations, 134, 135, 139 corruption, 307 Cortés, Hernán, 243–44 cost-benefit analysis, 177–86, 189, 194 Costco, 70 cost of capital, 76, 77, 179, 182 cost of doing business, 232 counterfactual thinking, 201, 272, 309–10 cramming, 83, 262 credible intervals, 159 crime, 16, 161, 231, 232 broken windows theory and, 235–36 Cringley, Robert X., 253 critical mass, viii–x, 114–15, 117, 119, 120, 129, 194, 308 critical thinking, 201 crossing the chasm, 311–12 crossing the Rubicon, 244 crowdsourcing, 203–6, 286 culture, 113, 273 organizational, 107–8, 113, 273–80, 293 customers, 300 development of, 294 personas for, 300 types of, 298–300 winner-take-most markets and, 308 Cutco, 217 Danziger, Shai, 63 dark patterns, 226–29 Potemkin villages, 228–29 Darley, John, 259 Darwin, Charles, 100, 101, 291 data, 130–31, 143, 146, 301 binary, 152 dredging of, 169–70 in graphs, see graphs mean in, 146, 149, 151 meta-analysis of, 172–73 outliers in, 148 streaks and clusters in, 144 variance in, 149 see also experiments; statistics dating, 8–10, 95 daycare center, 222–23 deadlines, 89 death, causes of, 17 death by a thousand cuts, 38 debate, 225 decisions, 1–2, 11, 31, 127, 129, 131–33, 175, 209 business case and, 207 choices and, 62–63 cost-benefit analysis in, 177–86, 189, 194 decision fatigue and, 63–64 decision tree in, 186–90, 194, 215 Eisenhower Decision Matrix, 72–74, 89, 124, 125 irreversible, 61–62, 223–24 opportunity cost and, 76–77, 80, 83, 179, 182, 188, 305 past, analyzing, 201, 271–72 pro-con list in, 175–78, 185, 189 reversible, 61–62 sequences of, 144 small, tyranny of, 38, 55 utilitarianism and, 189–90 Declaration of Independence, 222 deep work, 72, 76, 88, 278 default effect, 87–88 Defense, U.S.


pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Tiny eddies of air can be influenced by an almost immeasurably small event—something like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings—and these eddies can affect larger currents, which in turn alter the way cold and warm fronts build—a chain of events that can magnify the initial disturbance exponentially, thereby completely undermining attempts to make reliable predictions. Lorenz’s program had been correct. When, several years later, Lorenz presented a paper about his findings, he titled it “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” The phrase “the butterfly effect” entered the world.* • • • Lorenz’s butterfly effect is a physical manifestation of the phenomenon of complexity—not “complexity” in the sense that we use the term in daily life, a catchall for things that are not simple or intuitive, but complexity in a more restrictive, technical, and baffling sense. This kind of complexity is difficult to define; those who study it often fall back on Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s comment on obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”

Because of speed and interdependence, street vendor Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi could set off a chain of events that toppled multiple governments faster than the rest of the world could even process the news. Of course, there were successful revolutionaries and butterfly-effect phenomena before the information age, but new technologies have created an unprecedented proliferation of opportunities for small, historically disenfranchised actors to have a butterfly effect. Some of this has positive consequences, like entrepreneurial success. Other manifestations are devastating: terrorists, insurgents, and cybercriminals have taken advantage of speed and interdependence to cause death and wreak havoc.

A small change at the start of a chess game—say, moving a pawn to A3 instead of A4—can lead to a completely different result, just as the flapping of one of Lorenz’s butterflies might create huge, nonlinear havoc down the line. A reductionist instruction card would be useless for playing chess—the interactions generate too many possibilities. • • • The significance of Lorenz’s butterfly effect is not, however, just the nonlinear escalation of a minor input into a major output. There’s uncertainty involved; the amplification of the disturbance is not the product of a single, constant, identifiable magnifying factor—any number of seemingly insignificant inputs might—or might not—result in nonlinear escalation.


Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby by Sau Sheong Chang

Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, business process, butterfly effect, cloud computing, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, data science, Debian, duck typing, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Gini coefficient, income inequality, invisible hand, p-value, price stability, Ruby on Rails, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, text mining, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, We are the 99%, web application, wikimedia commons

We have discussed emergent behavior, where small local rules result in complex, macro-level, group behavior. The pattern we have observed here, rather than emergent behavior, can be classified as a kind of “butterfly effect”; see the sidebar Butterfly Effect. Figure 8-6. Population fluctuation swings, resulting in extinction of the roids Butterfly Effect In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change somewhere in a nonlinear system can result in large differences at a later stage. This name was coined by Edward Lorenz, one of the pioneers of chaos theory (and no relation to Max Lorenz of the Lorenz curve fame).

We observed that it is difficult to reach a state where a population is stable enough to survive for a long time. Very often, population fluctuations involve crazy swings that eventually end with the extinction of the society, even with identical starting parameters. We observed that a small effect can ripple down, causing unexpected changes—a phenomenon known as the butterfly effect. The final scenario dealt with evolution. We simulated natural selection by getting the offspring of the roids to inherit traits of their parents. These traits were specially designed to influence the survivability of the roids over a period of time. We anticipated that, if natural selection occurred, the traits of the roid population would move toward those that allow it to best survive.

: (question mark, colon), in Ruby ternary conditional expression, if and unless > (right angle bracket), The R Console, Variables and Functions -> assignment operator, R, Variables and Functions > R console prompt, The R Console ' ' (single quotes), enclosing Ruby strings, Strings [ ] (square brackets), Vectors, Matrices, Data frames accessing subset of R data frame, Data frames enclosing R matrix indexes, Matrices enclosing R vector indexes, Vectors [[ ]] (square brackets, double), enclosing single R vector index, Vectors A aes() function, R, Aesthetics An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (University of Chicago Press), The Invisible Hand apply() function, R, Interpreting the Data Armchair Economist (Free Press), How to Be an Armchair Economist array() function, R, Arrays arrays, R, Arrays–Arrays arrays, Ruby, Arrays and hashes–Arrays and hashes, Arrays and hashes artificial society, Money (see Utopia example) as.Date() function, R, Number of Messages by Day 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a database, Importing data from text files, The First Simulation–The First Simulation, Interpreting the Data, How to Be an Armchair Economist, The Simulation, Grab and Parse–Grab and Parse, The Emailing Habits of Enron Executives–The Emailing Habits of Enron Executives, Homemade Digital Stethoscope–Extracting Data from Sound, Extracting Data from Sound–Extracting Data from Sound, Homemade Pulse Oximeter–Extracting Data from Video, Extracting Data from Video analyzing, Data, Data, Everywhere–Data, Data, Everywhere, Bringing the World to Us, How to Be an Armchair Economist charts for, How to Be an Armchair Economist (see charts) obstacles to, Data, Data, Everywhere–Data, Data, Everywhere simulations for, Bringing the World to Us (see simulations) audio, from stethoscope, Homemade Digital Stethoscope–Extracting Data from Sound CSV files for, Importing data from text files, The First Simulation–The First Simulation, Interpreting the Data, The Simulation, Extracting Data from Sound–Extracting Data from Sound, Extracting Data from Video from Enron, The Emailing Habits of Enron Executives–The Emailing Habits of Enron Executives from Gmail, Grab and Parse–Grab and Parse importing, R, Importing Data–Importing data from a database video, from pulse oximeter, Homemade Pulse Oximeter–Extracting Data from Video data frames, R, Data frames–Data frames data mining, The Idea data.frame() function, R, Data frames database, importing data from, Importing data from a database–Importing data from a database dbConnect() function, R, Importing data from a database dbGet() function, R, Importing data from a database DBI packages, R, Importing data from a database–Importing data from a database Debian system, installing Ruby on, Installing Ruby using your platform’s package management tool def keyword, Ruby, Classes and objects dimnames() function, R, Matrices distribution, normal, Money dollar sign ($), preceding R list item names, Lists doodling example, Shoes doodler–Shoes doodler double quotes (" "), enclosing Ruby strings, Strings duck typing, Ruby, Code like a duck–Code like a duck dynamic typing, Ruby, Code like a duck–Code like a duck E economics example, A Simple Market Economy–A Simple Market Economy, The Producer–The Producer, The Consumer–The Consumer, Some Convenience Methods–Some Convenience Methods, The Simulation–The Simulation, Analyzing the Simulation–Analyzing the Simulation, The Producer–The Producer, The Consumer–The Consumer, Market–Market, The Simulation–The Simulation, Analyzing the Second Simulation–Analyzing the Second Simulation, Price Controls–Price Controls charts for, Analyzing the Simulation–Analyzing the Simulation, Analyzing the Second Simulation–Analyzing the Second Simulation Consumer class for, The Consumer–The Consumer, The Consumer–The Consumer Market class for, Some Convenience Methods–Some Convenience Methods, Market–Market modeling, A Simple Market Economy–A Simple Market Economy price controls analysis, Price Controls–Price Controls Producer class for, The Producer–The Producer, The Producer–The Producer simulations for, The Simulation–The Simulation, The Simulation–The Simulation email example, Grab and Parse–Grab and Parse, The Emailing Habits of Enron Executives–The Emailing Habits of Enron Executives, Number of Messages by Day of the Month–Number of Messages by Day of the Month, Number of Messages by Day of the Month–Number of Messages by Hour of the Day, MailMiner–MailMiner, Number of Messages by Day of Week–Number of Messages by Hour of the Day, Interactions–Comparative Interactions, Text Mining–Text Mining charts for, Number of Messages by Day of the Month–Number of Messages by Hour of the Day content of messages, analyzing, Text Mining–Text Mining data for, Grab and Parse–Grab and Parse Enron data for, The Emailing Habits of Enron Executives–The Emailing Habits of Enron Executives interactions in email, analyzing, Interactions–Comparative Interactions number of messages, analyzing, Number of Messages by Day of the Month–Number of Messages by Day of the Month, Number of Messages by Day of Week–Number of Messages by Hour of the Day R package for, creating, MailMiner–MailMiner emergent behavior, The Origin of Boids (see also flocking example) Enron Corporation scandal, The Emailing Habits of Enron Executives Epstein, Joshua (researcher), It’s a Good Life Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (Brookings Institution Press/MIT Press), It’s a Good Life equal sign (=), assignment operator, R, Variables and Functions Euclidean distance, Roids evolution, Evolution example applications, Using Code Examples, Shoes stopwatch–Shoes stopwatch, Shoes doodler–Shoes doodler, The R Console–Sourcing Files and the Command Line, Data frames–Introducing ggplot2, qplot–qplot, Statistical transformation–Geometric object, Adjustments–Adjustments, Offices and Restrooms, A Simple Market Economy, Grab and Parse, My Beating Heart, Schooling Fish and Flocking Birds, Money artificial utopian society, Money (see Utopia example) birds flocking, Schooling Fish and Flocking Birds (see flocking example) doodling, Shoes doodler–Shoes doodler economics, A Simple Market Economy (see economics example) email, Grab and Parse (see email example) fuel economy, qplot–qplot, Adjustments–Adjustments heartbeat, My Beating Heart (see heartbeat example) height and weight, The R Console–Sourcing Files and the Command Line league table, Data frames–Introducing ggplot2 movie database, Statistical transformation–Geometric object permission to use, Using Code Examples restrooms, Offices and Restrooms (see restrooms example) stopwatch, Shoes stopwatch–Shoes stopwatch expressions, R, Programming R external libraries, Ruby, Requiring External Libraries–Requiring External Libraries F factor() function, R, Factors, Text Mining factors, R, Factors–Factors FFmpeg library, Extracting Data from Video, Extracting Data from Video field of vision (FOV), Roids fish, schools of, Schooling Fish and Flocking Birds (see flocking example) flocking example, Schooling Fish and Flocking Birds–The Origin of Boids, The Origin of Boids, Simulation–Simulation, Roids–Roids, The Boid Flocking Rules–Putting in Obstacles, The Boid Flocking Rules–The Boid Flocking Rules, A Variation on the Rules–A Variation on the Rules, Going Round and Round–Going Round and Round, Putting in Obstacles–Putting in Obstacles Boids algorithm for, Schooling Fish and Flocking Birds–The Origin of Boids centering path for, Going Round and Round–Going Round and Round obstacles in path for, Putting in Obstacles–Putting in Obstacles research regarding, A Variation on the Rules–A Variation on the Rules Roid class for, Roids–Roids rules for, The Origin of Boids, The Boid Flocking Rules–The Boid Flocking Rules simulations for, Simulation–Simulation, The Boid Flocking Rules–Putting in Obstacles flows, Shoes, Shoes stopwatch fonts used in this book, Conventions Used in This Book–Conventions Used in This Book for loop, R, Conditionals and Loops format() function, R, Number of Messages by Day of the Month FOV (field of vision), Roids fuel economy example, qplot–qplot, Adjustments–Adjustments function class, R, Programming R functions, R, Variables and Functions–Variables and Functions G GAM (generalized addictive model), The Changes gem command, Ruby, Requiring External Libraries .gem file extension, Requiring External Libraries generalized addictive model (GAM), The Changes Gentleman, Robert (creator of R), Introducing R geom_bar() function, R, Interpreting the Data, The Second Simulation, The Final Simulation geom_histogram() function, R, Geometric object geom_line() function, R, Analyzing the Simulation geom_point() function, R, Plot, Interpreting the Data, Generating the Heart Sounds Waveform geom_smooth() function, R, Interpreting the Data ggplot() function, R, Plot ggplot2 package, R, Introducing ggplot2–Adjustments Gini coefficient, Money Git utility, Ruby Version Manager (RVM) Gmail, retrieving message data from, Grab and Parse–Grab and Parse graphics device, opening, Basic Graphs graphics package, R, Basic Graphs graphs, Charting (see charts) Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (Brookings Institution Press/MIT Press), It’s a Good Life H hash mark, curly brackets (#{ }), enclosing Ruby string escape sequences, Strings hashes, Ruby, Arrays and hashes–Arrays and hashes heart, diagram of, Generating the Heart Sounds Waveform heartbeat example, My Beating Heart, My Beating Heart, My Beating Heart, Homemade Digital Stethoscope, Homemade Digital Stethoscope, Homemade Digital Stethoscope–Extracting Data from Sound, Generating the Heart Sounds Waveform–Generating the Heart Sounds Waveform, Generating the Heart Sounds Waveform, Finding the Heart Rate–Finding the Heart Rate, Homemade Pulse Oximeter–Homemade Pulse Oximeter, Homemade Pulse Oximeter–Extracting Data from Video, Generating the Heartbeat Waveform and Calculating the Heart Rate–Generating the Heartbeat Waveform and Calculating the Heart Rate, Generating the Heartbeat Waveform and Calculating the Heart Rate–Generating the Heartbeat Waveform and Calculating the Heart Rate charts for, Generating the Heart Sounds Waveform–Generating the Heart Sounds Waveform, Generating the Heartbeat Waveform and Calculating the Heart Rate–Generating the Heartbeat Waveform and Calculating the Heart Rate data for, Homemade Digital Stethoscope–Extracting Data from Sound, Homemade Pulse Oximeter–Extracting Data from Video audio from stethoscope, Homemade Digital Stethoscope–Extracting Data from Sound video from pulse oximeter, Homemade Pulse Oximeter–Extracting Data from Video heart rate, My Beating Heart, Finding the Heart Rate–Finding the Heart Rate, Generating the Heartbeat Waveform and Calculating the Heart Rate–Generating the Heartbeat Waveform and Calculating the Heart Rate finding from video file, Generating the Heartbeat Waveform and Calculating the Heart Rate–Generating the Heartbeat Waveform and Calculating the Heart Rate finding from WAV file, Finding the Heart Rate–Finding the Heart Rate health parameters for, My Beating Heart heart sounds, My Beating Heart, My Beating Heart, Homemade Digital Stethoscope, Generating the Heart Sounds Waveform health parameters for, My Beating Heart recording, Homemade Digital Stethoscope types of, My Beating Heart, Generating the Heart Sounds Waveform homemade pulse oximeter for, Homemade Pulse Oximeter–Homemade Pulse Oximeter homemade stethoscope for, Homemade Digital Stethoscope height and weight example, The R Console–Sourcing Files and the Command Line here-documents, Ruby, Strings hex editor, Extracting Data from Sound histograms, Statistical transformation, Geometric object, Money–Money Homebrew tool, Installing Ruby using your platform’s package management tool hyphen (-), Variables and Functions, Variables and Functions -> assignment operator, R, Variables and Functions <- assignment operator, R, Variables and Functions I icons used in this book, Conventions Used in This Book if expression, R, Conditionals and Loops if expression, Ruby, if and unless–if and unless Ihaka, Ross (creator of R), Introducing R ImageMagick library, Extracting Data from Video IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), Grab and Parse importing data, R, Importing Data–Importing data from a database inheritance, Ruby, Inheritance–Inheritance initialize method, Ruby, Classes and objects inner product, Roids–Roids installation, Installing Ruby–Installing Ruby using your platform’s package management tool, Installing Shoes–Installing Shoes, Introducing R, Installing packages–Installing packages R, Introducing R R packages, Installing packages–Installing packages Ruby, Installing Ruby–Installing Ruby using your platform’s package management tool Shoes, Installing Shoes–Installing Shoes Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), Grab and Parse Internet Message Format, The Emailing Habits of Enron Executives invisible hand metaphor, The Invisible Hand irb application, Running Ruby–Running Ruby J jittering, Adjustments jpeg() function, R, Basic Graphs L Landsburg, Stephen E.


pages: 346 words: 92,984

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

In the early 1960s, he noticed that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere could give rise to vast and often unexpected results. These observations ultimately led him to develop what became known as the butterfly effect, a term that grew out of an academic paper he presented in 1972 entitled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”7 The butterfly effect has significant relevance in all matters of health. We are each agents of change in the Lucky Years; we are each butterflies flapping our wings in a space-time continuum on earth. How we live today affects how we are tomorrow.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com Contents NOTE TO READERS EPIGRAPH LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS INTRODUCTION DESTINY OF THE SPECIES Welcome to the Lucky Years CHAPTER 1 THE CENTURY OF BIOLOGY The Cure Is Already Inside You CHAPTER 2 THIS ISN’T SCIENCE FICTION The Power of Technology to Extend Your Life CHAPTER 3 THE FUTURE YOU How Your Small Data in the Context of Big Data Will Save You CHAPTER 4 THE DAWN OF PRECISION MEDICINE How to Manage Its Power and Perils CHAPTER 5 TAKE THE TWO-WEEK CHALLENGE How to Measure and Interpret Your Own Data CHAPTER 6 THE DANGER OF MISINFORMATION How to Know Whom and What to Trust CHAPTER 7 A BODY IN MOTION TENDS TO STAY LUCKY The One Supplement You’re Not Getting Enough Of CHAPTER 8 WONDER DRUGS THAT WORK Sleep, Sex, Touching, and Tools to Tame Inflammation CHAPTER 9 THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT Get Ready to Flap Your Wings ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR NOTES INDEX NOTE TO READERS This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is intended to provide helpful and informative materials on the subjects addressed in the publication. It is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not engaged in rendering medical, health, or any other kind of professional services in the book.

The Lucky Years are already here. And even though we’re entering a high-tech era of medicine, the same old ancient secrets to a good, long life are still relevant. Nothing will ever be able to substitute for things like sleep, sex, and touch—and perhaps gnawing on the bark of a willow tree. CHAPTER 9 The Butterfly Effect Get Ready to Flap Your Wings All religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence, and leading the individual toward freedom. —Albert Einstein Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.


pages: 414 words: 101,285

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

It seeks to overcome the benign neglect of systemic risk, which is not sustainable, and promote a more resilient and inclusive globalization. To this end, it considers different dimensions of the problem, offering a number of conceptual tools and lessons for managing the challenges of globalization and systemic risk. The butterfly effect has become widely known to signify systems in which a small change in one place can lead to major differences in a remote and unconnected system. The name of the effect has origins in the work of Edward Lorenz, who illustrated how a hurricane’s formation may be contingent on whether a distant butterfly had, days or weeks before, flapped its wings.1 The effect was subsequently taken up in chaos theory, which draws on a long tradition of examining the unexpected consequences of changes to initial conditions in physics.

The waters devastated the production plants of car manufacturers like Honda, Nissan, and Toyota and halted the operations of computing firms such as Toshiba and Western Digital. The World Economic Forum (WEF) concluded in 2012 that these widespread consequences had occurred because of an “efficient … supply chain which did not leave much room for catastrophic events.”23 The proverb that lends its name to the butterfly effect says that the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can cause a storm in the United States. In this case a storm in Thailand caused the fluttering of shareholders’ balance sheets in California as Intel saw profits fall by over $1 billion in the last quarter of 2011 alone.24 It is worth noting that the systemic effects of the 2011 Thailand floods are by no means unique or unprecedented.

With better management there is the potential for all citizens to share in our world’s magnificent achievements, the most impressive of which could be yet to come. Notes PREFACE 1. Edward N. Lorenz, 1963, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20 (2): 130–141. The original metaphor referred to the flapping of a seagull’s wings. The term “butterfly effect” was coined later by a colleague, Phil Merilees, as the title for one of Lorenz’s talks. See Tim Palmer, 2009, “Edward Norton Lorenz, 23 May 1916–16 April 2008,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 55: 139–155, esp. 145 ff. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1. Ian Goldin and Tiffany Vogel, 2010, “Global Governance and Systemic Risk in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Financial Crisis,” Global Policy 1 (1): 4–15.


pages: 208 words: 70,860

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Olbers’ paradox, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

Poincaré had discovered that the way a system of even just three interacting bodies evolves in time cannot be knowable exactly—let alone one involving all bodies in the solar system (at least, all the planets and their moons, along with the Sun). But the implications of this discovery would have to wait another three-quarters of a century. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT Let’s give our all-powerful computer the far more modest task of predicting the way the balls on a pool table will scatter when hit by the cue ball at the start of a game. Every ball on the table will be knocked in some way and most will undergo multiple collisions, many bouncing off each other and the sides of the table.

This is why it is so difficult to make long-term weather predictions, since we can never know to infinite accuracy all the variables that affect the real weather. It’s just like the pool-table example, only far more complicated. We can now know with reasonable reliability if it will rain in a few days’ time, but we can never know if will rain on this date next year. It was this profound realization that led Lorenz to coin the term “the butterfly effect.” The idea of the flap of a butterfly’s wings having a far-reaching ripple-type effect on subsequent events seems to have first appeared in a short story called “A Sound of Thunder,” written in 1952 by Ray Bradbury. The idea was borrowed by Lorenz, who popularized it as the now familiar notion of the flapping of a butterfly’s wings somewhere leading months later to a hurricane on the other side of the world.

That future would be knowable only if we were able to view the whole of space and time from the outside. But for us, and our consciousnesses, embedded within space-time, that future is never knowable to us. It is that very unpredictability that gives us an open future. The choices we make are, to us, real choices, and because of the butterfly effect, tiny changes brought about by our different decisions can lead to very different outcomes, and hence different futures. So, thanks to chaos theory, our future is never knowable to us. You might prefer to say that the future is preordained and that our free will is just an illusion—but the point remains that our actions still determine which of the infinite number of possible futures is the one that gets played out.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Classification: LCC BF637.D42 S55 2023 | DDC 177/.3—dc23/eng/20230322 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049503 ISBNs: 9781541602236 (hardcover), 9781541602243 (ebook) E3-20230519-JV-NF-ORI CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Introduction PART 1: HABITS Chapter 1: Focus—Think About What’s Missing Chapter 2: Prediction—Expect to Be Surprised Chapter 3: Commitment—Be Careful When You Assume Chapter 4: Efficiency—Ask More Questions PART 2: HOOKS Chapter 5: Consistency—Appreciate the Value of Noise Chapter 6: Familiarity—Discount What You Think You Know Chapter 7: Precision—Take Appropriate Measures Chapter 8: Potency—Be Wary of “Butterfly Effects” Conclusion: Somebody’s Fool Acknowledgments Discover More Notes About the Authors Also by the Authors Praise for Nobody’s Fool Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more. Tap here to learn more. INTRODUCTION “Once in a while, we can all be fooled by something.”

In this chapter, we’ve seen how easily we can be hooked by precisely stated claims that aren’t justified—mistaken inferences drawn from erroneous model assumptions, overgeneralization based on small samples, and too-perfect predictions of future events. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss the ways in which we’re hooked by claims of potency—offers in which the benefits or effects are out of proportion to the costs or causes involved. CHAPTER 8 POTENCY—BE WARY OF “BUTTERFLY EFFECTS” According to the popular science cliché, a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas. We find potency unduly persuasive, when in reality, we should be wary whenever anyone claims that a big effect can come from a small cause. In 2021, American social media influencer Caroline Calloway launched her own brand of essential oils with a marketing blitz to her more than 600,000 Instagram followers.

The notion that unscrambling sentences for a few minutes unconsciously spread to the general idea of aging and thence to the association between aging and walking speed, thereby causing someone to walk more slowly in a different place some time later, is implausible in light of what we know from decades of rigorous priming research.14 Nonetheless, there was a chance that Bargh had discovered one of those extraordinarily rare butterfly effects. Rather than accept the potency of these metaphorical priming results at face value or dismiss them out of hand, we decided to check for ourselves. We worked with our students to replicate a more recent finding from the Bargh group that followed the same priming logic. That study, published in Science in 2008, tested the idea that experiencing physical warmth would activate the concept of warmth, thereby priming other meanings of warmth, including interpersonal warmth, and leading people to judge other people to be “warmer.”


pages: 360 words: 85,321

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling by Adam Kucharski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, call centre, Chance favours the prepared mind, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, diversification, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flash crash, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, locking in a profit, Louis Pasteur, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, p-value, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

The problem, which is known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” means that even if we collect detailed measurements about a process—whether a roulette spin or a tropical storm—a small oversight could have dramatic consequences. Seventy years before mathematician Edward Lorenz gave a talk asking “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” Poincaré had outlined the “butterfly effect.” Lorenz’s work, which grew into chaos theory, focused chiefly on prediction. He was motivated by a desire to make better forecasts about the weather and to find a way to see further into the future. Poincaré was interested in the opposite problem: How long does it take for a process to become random?

According to Neil Johnson, who led the research, these events are a world away from the kind of situations covered by traditional financial theories. “Humans are unable to participate in real time,” he said, “and instead, an ultrafast ecology of robots rises up to take control.” WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT chaos theory, they often focus on the physics side of things. They might mention Edward Lorenz and his work on forecasting and the butterfly effect: the unpredictability of the weather, and the tornado caused by the flap of an insect’s wings. Or they might recall the story of the Eudaemons and roulette prediction, and how the trajectory of a billiard ball can be sensitive to initial conditions. Yet chaos theory has reached beyond the physical sciences.

“Roy Walford, 79; Eccentric UCLA Scientist Touted Food Restriction.” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2004. http://articles.latimes.com/2004/may/01/local/me-walford1. 7Many have told the tale: Ethier, “Testing for Favorable Numbers.” 7When Wilson published his data: Ethier, “Testing for Favorable Numbers.” 9Poincaré had outlined the “butterfly effect: Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Open Road, 2011). 9The Zodiac may be regarded: Poincaré, Science and Method. 10Blaise Pascal invented roulette: Bass, Thomas. The Newtonian Casino (London: Penguin, 1990). 10The orbiting roulette ball: The majority of details and quotes in this section are taken from Thorp, Edward.


pages: 266 words: 86,324

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, feminist movement, forensic accounting, Gary Kildall, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, index fund, Isaac Newton, law of one price, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pepto Bismol, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

But actually that does happen—for instance, if the extra time you spent caused you to cross paths with your future wife at the train station or to miss being hit by a car that sped through a red light. In fact, Lorenz’s story is itself an example of the butterfly effect, for if he hadn’t taken the minor decision to extend his calculation employing the shortcut, he would not have discovered the butterfly effect, a discovery which sparked a whole new field of mathematics. When we look back in detail on the major events of our lives, it is not uncommon to be able to identify such seemingly inconsequential random events that led to big changes.

After all, the satellites that collect weather data can measure parameters to only two or three decimal places, and so they cannot even track a difference as tiny as that between 0.293416 and 0.293. But Lorenz found that such small differences led to massive changes in the result.2 The phenomenon was dubbed the butterfly effect, based on the implication that atmospheric changes so small they could have been caused by a butterfly flapping its wings can have a large effect on subsequent global weather patterns. That notion might sound absurd—the equivalent of the extra cup of coffee you sip one morning leading to profound changes in your life.

In this experiment, as one song or another by chance got an early edge in downloads, its seeming popularity influenced future shoppers. It’s a phenomenon that is well-known in the movie industry: moviegoers will report liking a movie more when they hear beforehand how good it is. In this example, small chance influences created a snowball effect and made a huge difference in the future of the song. Again, it’s the butterfly effect. In our lives, too, we can see through the microscope of close scrutiny that many major events would have turned out differently were it not for the random confluence of minor factors, people we’ve met by chance, job opportunities that randomly came our way. For example, consider the actor who, for seven years starting in the late 1970s, lived in a fifth-floor walk-up on Forty-ninth Street in Manhattan, struggling to make a name for himself.


pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

Interestingly, the immediate example that Watts deploys is the economy: “The U.S. economy, for example, is the product of the individual actions of millions of people, as well as hundreds of thousands of firms, thousands of government agencies, and countless other external and internal factors, ranging from the weather in Texas to interest rates in China.”21 As Watts notes, disturbances in one part of the economy—say, in mortgage finance—can be amplified and produce major shocks for the entire economy, as in the “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. It is interesting that Watts would point to the economy, since efforts to construct large-scale economic models have been singularly unproductive to date. To put it even more strongly, I cannot think of an important economic insight that has come out of such models. In fact, they have often led us astray.

., 1n Boulding, Kenneth, 11 bounded rationality, 203 Bowles, Samuel, 71n Brazil: antipoverty programs of, 4 globalization and, 166 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 1–2 Britain, Great, property rights and, 98 bubbles, 152–58 business cycles, 125–37 balanced budgets and, 171 capital flow in, 127 classical economics and, 126–27, 129, 137 inflation in, 126–27, 133, 135, 137 new classical models and, 130–34, 136–37 butterfly effect, 39 California, University of: at Berkeley, 107, 136, 147 at Los Angeles, 139 Cameron, David, 109 capacity utilization rates, 130 capital, neoclassical distribution theory and, 122, 124 capital flow: in business cycles, 127 economic growth and, 17–18, 114, 164–67 globalization and, 164–67 growth diagnostics and, 90 speculation and, 2 capitalism, 118–24, 127, 144, 205, 207 carbon, emissions quotas vs. taxes in reduction of, 188–90, 191–92 Card, David, 57 Carlyle, Thomas, 118 carpooling, 192, 193–94 cartels, 95 Cartwright, Nancy, 20, 22n, 29 cash grants, 4, 55, 105–6 Cassidy, John, 157n Central Bank of India, 154 Chang, Ha-Joon, 11 chaos theory, butterfly effect and, 39 Chicago, University of, 131, 152 Chicago Board of Trade, 55 Chile, antipoverty programs and, 4 China, People’s Republic of, 156, 163, 164 cigarette industry, taxation and, 27–28 Clark, John Bates, 119 “Classical Gold Standard, The: Some Lessons for Today” (Bordo), 127n classical unemployment, 126 climate change, 188–90, 191–92 climate modeling, 38, 40 Cochrane, John, 131 coffee, 179, 185 Colander, David, 85 collective bargaining, 124–25, 143 Colombia, educational vouchers in, 24 colonialism, developmental economics and, 206–7 “Colonial Origins of Comparative Development, The” (Acemoglu, Robinson, and Johnson), 206–7 Columbia University, 2, 108 commitment, in game theory, 33 comparative advantage, 52–55, 58n, 59–60, 139, 170 compensation for risk models, 110 competition, critical assumptions in, 28–29 complementarities, 42 computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, 41 computational models, 38, 41 computers, model complexity and, 38 Comte, Auguste, 81 conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, 4, 105–6 congestion pricing, 2–3 Constitution, U.S., 187 construction industry, Great Recession and, 156 consumers, consumption, 119, 129, 130, 132, 136, 167 cross-price elasticity in, 180–81 consumer’s utility, 119 contextual truths, 20, 174 contingency, 25, 145, 173–74, 185 contracts, 88, 98, 161, 205 coordination models, 16–17, 42, 200 corn futures, 55 corruption, 87, 89, 91 costs, behavioral economics and, 70 Cotterman, Nancy, xiv Cournot, Antoine-Augustin, 13n Cournot competition, 68 credibility, in game theory, 33 “Credible Worlds, Capacities and Mechanisms” (Sugden), 172n credit rating agencies, 155 credit rationing, 64–65 critical assumptions, 18, 26–29, 94–98, 150–51, 180, 183–84, 202 cross-price elasticity, 180–81 Cuba, 57 currency: appreciation of, 60, 167 depreciation of, 153 economic growth and, 163–64, 167 current account deficits, 153 Curry, Brendan, xv Dahl, Gordon B., 151n Darwin, Charles, 113 Davis, Donald, 108 day care, 71, 190–91 Debreu, Gerard, 49–51 debt, national, 153 decision trees, 89–90, 90 DeLong, Brad, 136 democracy, social sciences and, 205 deposit insurance, 155 depreciation, currency, 153 Depression, Great, 2, 128, 153 deregulation, 143, 155, 158–59, 162, 168 derivatives, 153, 155 deterrence, in game theory, 33 development economics, 75–76, 86–93, 90, 159–67, 169, 201, 202 colonial settlement and, 206–7 institutions and, 98, 161, 202, 205–7 reform fatigue and, 88 diagnostic analysis, 86–93, 90, 97, 110–11 Dijkgraaf, Robbert, xiv “Dirtying White: Why Does Benn Steil’s History of Bretton Woods Distort the Ideas of Harry Dexter White?”

., 1n Boulding, Kenneth, 11 bounded rationality, 203 Bowles, Samuel, 71n Brazil: antipoverty programs of, 4 globalization and, 166 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 1–2 Britain, Great, property rights and, 98 bubbles, 152–58 business cycles, 125–37 balanced budgets and, 171 capital flow in, 127 classical economics and, 126–27, 129, 137 inflation in, 126–27, 133, 135, 137 new classical models and, 130–34, 136–37 butterfly effect, 39 California, University of: at Berkeley, 107, 136, 147 at Los Angeles, 139 Cameron, David, 109 capacity utilization rates, 130 capital, neoclassical distribution theory and, 122, 124 capital flow: in business cycles, 127 economic growth and, 17–18, 114, 164–67 globalization and, 164–67 growth diagnostics and, 90 speculation and, 2 capitalism, 118–24, 127, 144, 205, 207 carbon, emissions quotas vs. taxes in reduction of, 188–90, 191–92 Card, David, 57 Carlyle, Thomas, 118 carpooling, 192, 193–94 cartels, 95 Cartwright, Nancy, 20, 22n, 29 cash grants, 4, 55, 105–6 Cassidy, John, 157n Central Bank of India, 154 Chang, Ha-Joon, 11 chaos theory, butterfly effect and, 39 Chicago, University of, 131, 152 Chicago Board of Trade, 55 Chile, antipoverty programs and, 4 China, People’s Republic of, 156, 163, 164 cigarette industry, taxation and, 27–28 Clark, John Bates, 119 “Classical Gold Standard, The: Some Lessons for Today” (Bordo), 127n classical unemployment, 126 climate change, 188–90, 191–92 climate modeling, 38, 40 Cochrane, John, 131 coffee, 179, 185 Colander, David, 85 collective bargaining, 124–25, 143 Colombia, educational vouchers in, 24 colonialism, developmental economics and, 206–7 “Colonial Origins of Comparative Development, The” (Acemoglu, Robinson, and Johnson), 206–7 Columbia University, 2, 108 commitment, in game theory, 33 comparative advantage, 52–55, 58n, 59–60, 139, 170 compensation for risk models, 110 competition, critical assumptions in, 28–29 complementarities, 42 computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, 41 computational models, 38, 41 computers, model complexity and, 38 Comte, Auguste, 81 conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, 4, 105–6 congestion pricing, 2–3 Constitution, U.S., 187 construction industry, Great Recession and, 156 consumers, consumption, 119, 129, 130, 132, 136, 167 cross-price elasticity in, 180–81 consumer’s utility, 119 contextual truths, 20, 174 contingency, 25, 145, 173–74, 185 contracts, 88, 98, 161, 205 coordination models, 16–17, 42, 200 corn futures, 55 corruption, 87, 89, 91 costs, behavioral economics and, 70 Cotterman, Nancy, xiv Cournot, Antoine-Augustin, 13n Cournot competition, 68 credibility, in game theory, 33 “Credible Worlds, Capacities and Mechanisms” (Sugden), 172n credit rating agencies, 155 credit rationing, 64–65 critical assumptions, 18, 26–29, 94–98, 150–51, 180, 183–84, 202 cross-price elasticity, 180–81 Cuba, 57 currency: appreciation of, 60, 167 depreciation of, 153 economic growth and, 163–64, 167 current account deficits, 153 Curry, Brendan, xv Dahl, Gordon B., 151n Darwin, Charles, 113 Davis, Donald, 108 day care, 71, 190–91 Debreu, Gerard, 49–51 debt, national, 153 decision trees, 89–90, 90 DeLong, Brad, 136 democracy, social sciences and, 205 deposit insurance, 155 depreciation, currency, 153 Depression, Great, 2, 128, 153 deregulation, 143, 155, 158–59, 162, 168 derivatives, 153, 155 deterrence, in game theory, 33 development economics, 75–76, 86–93, 90, 159–67, 169, 201, 202 colonial settlement and, 206–7 institutions and, 98, 161, 202, 205–7 reform fatigue and, 88 diagnostic analysis, 86–93, 90, 97, 110–11 Dijkgraaf, Robbert, xiv “Dirtying White: Why Does Benn Steil’s History of Bretton Woods Distort the Ideas of Harry Dexter White?”


pages: 198 words: 57,703

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

Crucially, this does not mean that such knowledge couldn’t in principle be known—since in a deterministic universe the future is already preordained—it is just that, in practice, we would need to know the current conditions of the Earth’s climate to astonishing accuracy and have stupendous computational power to feed in all the data to make a precise simulation that could then be evolved mathematically to give a reliable prediction. It is this chaotic unpredictability that give rise to the famous ‘butterfly effect’: the idea that the tiny, seemingly inconsequential disturbance of the air caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world could gradually develop and grow until it dramatically affected the course of a hurricane on the other side of the world. This does not mean that there is a specific butterfly to which we can trace the cause of a hurricane, but rather that any tiny changes to the initial conditions can give rise to widely varying outcomes if we continue to evolve the system in time.

There is another way in which unpredictability and the appearance of randomness come into physics, and that is through the phenomenon of chaotic behaviour. Chaos appears in nature when there is an instability within a system, such that tiny changes to the way the system evolves over time can quickly grow. There’s that butterfly effect again. Sometimes even simple systems following simple, deterministic physical laws can behave in highly unpredictable and complex ways that seem to be truly random. But unlike in the quantum domain, where we don’t know whether unpredictability is due to true indeterminism or not,3 the unpredictability of a chaotic system is not—despite initial appearances—due to true randomness.

INDEX absolute zero, 102 Adams, Douglas, 5 AdS/CFT (anti–de Sitter/conformal theory correspondence; gauge/ gravity duality), 232–33 alpha particles, 101–2 Anderson, Carl, 103–4 Anderson, Philip, 47 Andromeda galaxy, 98 antigravity, 212–13 antimatter, 7, 13, 103–5 antiquarks, 96n1, 176n2 Anu (Sumerian god), 1 Archimedes, 16, 25 Aristotle, 16, 45, 57–58, 74, 77 artificial intelligence (AI), 161, 235, 240, 250, 255, 256–57 atomic clocks, 39 atomism, 16–17, 45 atoms, 15; composition of, 224; types of, 16–17 axions, 200 Banks, Joseph, 108 Bell, John, 126–27 beta radioactivity, 94, 96 Big Bang, 7, 32, 34, 98–101, 103, 150; cosmology model of, 179; in eternal inflation theory, 216; verification of, 269–70 binary data, 251 binary pulsars, 226 biology, 21, 111, 161, 236, 242–44 biomass, 151 biophysics, 242 bits, 251 black holes, 195, 221, 223, 233; entropy of, 279; evaporation of, 215, 220; formation of, 106; gravitational pull from, 72; Hawking radiation emitted from, 24, 220 block universe model, 68–69, 70–71, 79–81 Bohm, David, 136 Bohr, Niels, 122–23, 124, 125, 132 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 46 Born’s rule, 124 Bose-Einstein condensates, 226 bosons, 6–7, 13, 25, 93, 96–97, 181 Broglie, Louis de, 136 bubble universes, 217–18 Bullet Cluster, 197 butterfly effect, 157–58, 160 carbon, 106 celestial mechanics, 55 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), 174, 228 chaos, 21, 160–61 chemistry, 21, 91, 236, 241–42, 256; quantum theory and, 9, 117, 173, 246 Classical Physics, 111–12 climate, 151, 240, 271, 272–73 cloud technology, 255 COBE satellite, 199 cognitive dissonance, 272 cold dark matter, 179, 200 colour charge, 95–96, 175–76 comets, 18 complexity, 21 complex systems, 161 computer science, 241, 246, 250–58 concordance model, 179 condensed matter, 232, 233, 236 confirmation bias, 272, 277 conformal cyclic cosmology, 215–16 conservation, laws of, 41 consistent histories interpretation, 127 conspiracy theories, 271–72 constrained minimal supersymmetry, 231 Copenhagen interpretation, xiii, 123, 125, 127, 128 Copernican (heliocentric) model, 4, 26–27, 126 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 27 Cosmic Background Explorer (Explorer 66), 199n2 cosmic inflation, 208–19, 276 cosmic microwave background (CMB), 34, 101, 197, 198–99 cosmological constant, 203 cosmology, 12 creation myths, 1 Crick, Francis, 243 CT (computed tomography), 246 curved spacetime, 64n2, 78, 82, 187, 234; dark matter and, 196; gravitational field linked to 72–73, 163, 170; inflation and, 209 dark energy, 7, 9, 193, 202–5, 210, 226, 276 dark matter, 7, 9, 42, 105–6, 179, 193–201, 231, 276 de Broglie–Bohm theory, 137 decoherence, 133, 135 Delbrück, Max, 243 Democritus, 16, 44–45 Descartes, René, 55, 57–58, 59–60, 74, 77 determinism, 155–58 diffraction, 114 Dirac, Paul, 13, 14, 103, 171–72 Dirac notation, 124 disorder, 21 DNA, 243, 249 Doppler effect, 63 double helix, 243 doubt, in scientific inquiry, 266–67, 274 dwarf galaxies, 197 dynamical collapse interpretation, 127 economics, 161 Einstein, Albert, xiv, 124, 222–23, 280; field equations of, 82, 129; light quanta hypothesized by, 112–13; Newtonian theory replaced by, 8, 36, 61; nonlocality and entanglement mistrusted by, 131–32; as philosophical realist, 130; photoelectric effect explained by, 29–30; thought experiments by, 56.


pages: 327 words: 97,720

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo

Alfred Russel Wallace, biofilm, butterfly effect, Celebration, Florida, classic study, corporate governance, delayed gratification, experimental subject, gentrification, impulse control, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, placebo effect, post-industrial society, Rodney Brooks, Ted Kaczynski, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, Walter Mischel

In the field of complex adaptive systems, scientists refer to the Butterfly Effect, whereby the wind displaced by the flutter of a butterfly’s wing in Africa might initiate an immensely involved string of consequences that alter the weather over Europe days or weeks later. This particular example may be something of an exaggeration, but it isn’t just a metaphor. Using supercomputers, researchers can actually work out the details that allow simple causes to interact, compound, and amplify to yield complex and profound results. In more technical terms, the Butterfly Effect is called “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” and it reflects the way that small-scale events interact with large ones.

The simple realizations that we are not passive victims, that we do have some control, and that we can change our situation by changing our thoughts, expectations, and behaviors toward others can have a surprisingly empowering effect, especially on our conscious effort to self-regulate. A second inkling of control comes from recognizing that we have latitude in choosing where to invest our social energy. And as we saw in our discussion of the Butterfly Effect, it does not take an enormous change to alter one’s course and destination dramatically. Charitable activities enable us to put ourselves in the social picture with less fear of rejection or abuse, but even here some discretion is in order. Coaching kids’ soccer requires at least a little knowledge of the game, but being manager or assistant coach often requires nothing more than a willingness to show up and pass around the Gatorade and the orange slices.

Lower levels of trust within the local culture were associated with higher rates of mortality for every cause of death, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and infant mortality. One interpretation of such data: Social isolation, including social fragmentation, can kill. Henry Melvill wrote of our causes returning to us as effects; complexity theorists have their Butterfly Effect. Whether we think in terms of “sympathetic threads” or of autonomous agents acting in a complex system, the fact remains that individual behaviors created both the peace and beauty of Middlebury, Vermont, and the tribal warfare of the Sunni triangle. Of course vast economic, political, and cultural forces are also at play, but ultimately, human beings shape their environment through individual, iterative behaviors.


pages: 295 words: 66,824

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

They’re also easier to predict mathematically, and this is why they’re so often employed whether their application is appropriate or not. The chestnut about the economist looking for his lost car keys under the street lamp comes to mind. “You probably lost them near the car,” his companion remonstrates, to which the economist responds, “I know, but the light is better over here.” The “butterfly effect” is the term often used for the sensitive dependence of nonlinear systems, a characteristic that has been noted in phenomena ranging from fluid flow and heart fibrillations to epilepsy and price fluctuations. The name comes from the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings someplace in South America might be sufficient to change future weather systems, helping to bring about, say, a tornado in Oklahoma that would otherwise not have occurred.

Brian auditors Aumann, Robert availability error average values compared with distribution of incomes risk as variance from averages average return compared with median return average value compared with distribution of incomes buy-sell rules and outguessing average guess risk as variance from average value averaging down Bachelier, Louis Bak, Per Barabasi, Albert-Lazló Bartiromo, Maria bear markets investor self-descriptions and shorting and distorting strategy in Benford, Frank Benford’s Law applying to corporate fraud background of frequent occurrence of numbers governed by Bernoulli, Daniel Beta (B) values causes of variations in comparing market against individual stocks or funds strengths and weaknesses of technique for finding volatility and Big Bang billiards, as example of nonlinear system binary system biorhythm theory Black, Fischer Black-Scholes option formula blackjack strategies Blackledge, Todd “blow up,” investor blue chip companies, P/E ratio of Bogle, John bonds Greenspan’s impact on bond market history of stocks outperforming will not necessarily continue to be outperformed by stocks Bonds, Barry bookkeeping. see accounting practices bottom-line investing Brock, William brokers. see stock brokers Buffett, Warren bull markets investor self-descriptions and pump and dump strategy in Butterfly Economics (Ormerod) “butterfly effect,” of nonlinear systems buy-sell rules buying on the margin. see also margin investments calendar effects call options. see also stock options covering how they work selling strategies valuation tools campaign contributions Capital Asset Pricing Model capital gains vs. dividends Central Limit Theorem CEOs arrogance of benefits in manipulating stock prices remuneration compared with that of average employee volatility due to malfeasance of chain letters Chaitin, Gregory chance. see also whim trading strategies and as undeniable factor in market chaos theory. see also nonlinear systems charity Clayman, Michelle cognitive illusions availability error confirmation bias heuristics rules of thumb for saving time mental accounts status quo bias Cohen, Abby Joseph coin flipping common knowledge accounting scandals and definition and importance to investors dynamic with private knowledge insider trading and parable illustrating private information becoming companies/corporations adjusting results to meet expectations applying Benford’s Law to corporate fraud comparing corporate and personal accounting financial health and P/E ratio of blue chips competition vs. cooperation, prisoner’s dilemma complexity changing over time horizon of sequences (mathematics) of trading strategies compound interest as basis of wealth doubling time and formulas for future value and present value and confirmation bias definition of investments reflecting stock-picking and connectedness. see also networks European market causing reaction on Wall Street interactions based on whim interactions between technical traders and value traders irrational interactions between traders Wolfram model of interactions between traders Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) contrarian investing dogs of the Dow measures of excellence and rate of return and cooperation vs. competition, prisoner’s dilemma correlation coefficient. see also statistical correlations counter-intuitive investment counterproductive behavior, psychology of covariance calculation of portfolio diversification based on portfolio volatility and stock selection and Cramer, James crowd following or not herd-like nature of price movements dart throwing, stock-picking contest in the Wall Street Journal data mining illustrated by online chatrooms moving averages and survivorship bias and trading strategies and DeBondt, Werner Deciding What’s News (Gans) decimalization reforms decision making minimizing regret selling WCOM depression of derivatives trading, Enron despair and guilt over market losses deviation from the mean. see also mean value covariance standard deviation (d) variance dice, probability and Digex discounting process, present value of future money distribution of incomes distribution of wealth dynamic of concentration UN report on diversified portfolios. see stock portfolios, diversifying dividends earnings and proposals benefitting returns from Dodd, David dogs of the Dow strategy “dominance” principle, game theory dot com IPOs, as a pyramid scheme double-bottom trend reversal “double-dip” recession double entry bookkeeping doubling time, compound interest and Dow dogs of the Dow strategy percentages of gains and losses e (exponential growth) compound interest and higher mathematics and earnings anchoring effect and complications with determination of inflating (WCOM) P/E ratio and stock valuation and East, Steven H.

Kozlowski, Dennis Kraus, Karl Krauthammer, Charles Kudlow, Larry Lakonishok, Josef Landsburg, Steven Lay, Ken LeBaron, Blake Lefevre, Edwin Leibweber, David linguistics, power law and Lo, Andrew logistic curve lognormal distribution Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) losing through winning loss aversion lotteries present value and as tax on stupidity Lynch, Peter MacKinlay, Craig mad money Malkiel, Burton management, manipulating stock prices Mandelbrot, Benoit margin calls margin investments buying on the margin as investment type margin calls selling on the margin market makers decimalization and World Class Options Market Maker (WCOMM) Markowitz, Harry mathematics, generally Greek movies and plays about outguessing the average guess risk and stock markets and Mathews, Eddie “maximization of expected value” principle mean value. see also expected value arithmetic mean deviation from the mean geometric mean regression to the mean using interchangeably with expected value media celebrities and crisis mentality and impact on market volatility median rate of return Merrill Lynch Merton, Robert mnemonic rules momentum investing money, categorizing into mental accounts Morgenson, Gretchen Motley Fool contrarian investment strategy PEG ratio and moving averages complications with evidence supporting example of generating buy-sell rules from getting the big picture with irrelevant in efficient market phlegmatic nature of mu (m) multifractal forgeries mutual funds expert picks and hedge funds index funds politically incorrect rationale for socially regressive funds mutual knowledge, contrasted with common knowledge Nash equilibrium Nash, John Neff, John negatively correlated stocks as basis of mutual fund selection as basis of stock selection stock portfolios and networks Internet as example of price movements and six degrees of separation and A New Kind of Science (Wolfram) Newcomb, Simon Newcombe, William Newcombe’s paradox Niederhoffer, Victor Nigrini, Mark nominal value A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street (Lo and MacKinlay) nonlinear systems billiards example “butterfly effect” or sensitive dependence of chaos theory and fractals and investor behavior and normal distribution Nozick, Robert numbers anchoring effect Benford’s Law and Fibonacci numbers and off-shore entities, Enron Once Upon a Number (Paulos) online chatrooms online trading optimal portfolio balancing with risk-free portfolio Markowitz efficient frontier of options. see stock options Ormerod, Paul O’Shaughnessy, James P/B (price-to-book) ratio P/E ratio interpreting measuring future earnings expectations PEG variation on stock valuation and P/S (price to sales) ratio paradoxes Efficient Market Hypothesis and examples of Newcombe’s paradox Parrondo’s paradox St.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

You wouldn’t think that printing technology would have anything to do with the expansion of our vision down to the cellular scale, just as you wouldn’t have thought that the evolution of pollen would alter the design of a hummingbird’s wing. But that is the way change happens. This may sound, at first blush, like a variation on the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory, where the flap of a butterfly’s wing in California ends up triggering a hurricane in the mid-Atlantic. But in fact, the two are fundamentally different. The extraordinary (and unsettling) property of the butterfly effect is that it involves a virtually unknowable chain of causality; you can’t map the link between the air molecules bouncing around the butterfly and the storm system brewing in the Atlantic.

., Signal Corps, 104 Ashenburg, Katherine, 138 Astronomy, 38, 41, 170, 184, 187 See also Observatories; Telescopes Atomic clocks, 186–88 Audion, 106, 107 Automobiles, 74, 92, 133, 185, 229 impact on settlement patterns of, 80 Babbage, Charles, 185, 245–46, 247, 248, 250–53 Babylonians, 198 Baliani, Giovanni Battista, 166 Baltimore, 180 Bangkok, 83 Bar codes, 233–34, 236 Barovier, Angelo, 19 Basker, Emek, 233–34 Batchelor, Charles, 211 Bathing, 45, 137–38, 139, 140 Bathing suits, women’s, 149–50 Beatles, 114 Beecher, Catharine, 138 Bell, Alexander Graham, 9, 94, 97–98, 98, 103 Bell Labs, 30, 100–105, 107, 108, 113, 114, 116, 184, 211, 232 Bering Land Bridge, 191 Berlin Jazz Festival, 112–13 Best Buy, 234 Betamax, 7 Bible, 25 Old Testament, 216 Biden, Joe, 83 Big Bang, 40 Binary code, 30, 158 Birdseye, Clarence, 72, 73, 74–75, 84 in Labrador, 68, 70, 71, 253 Birmingham (England), 174 Black Friday stock market crash, 74 Bohr, Niels, 186, 194 Bombay, 53, 55 B&O Railroad, 182 Boston, 58, 250 ice shipped from, 48–52, 54, 57 Water Works in, 130 Boston Gazette, 49 Boulders, The (Las Vegas), 228 Boyle, Robert, 64 Boys, Charles Vernon, 27, 28, 29 Brand, Steward, 192 Brasília, 226, 229 Brazil, 8, 210 Briggs House (Chicago), 133 Bright, Arthur A., 206, 208 Broad Exchange (New York), 100 Brooklyn, 110, 219, 220 Brown, Denis Scott, 226, 229–31 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 32 Brush Electric Light, 214 Buckley, O. E., 104–5 Butterfly effect, 5 Byron, Annabella, 242, 244, 245 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 241, 242, 244, 245 Calcutta, 55 California, 83 Caltech, 156, 158 Candles, 19, 20, 198, 200–201, 204, 205, 217 Cape Town, 128 Carbon dating, 190–92 Carré, Ferdinand, 66–67 Carrier, Willis, 76–80, 82, 83 Carrier Corporation, 76, 77, 79 Cattle ranching, 58 Cave paintings, 87–90, 89, 120, 122 Celsius scale, 64 Cell phones, 31, 100, 102, 189–90, 194 Central Council for Health Education, 139 Central time zone, 183 Cesium, 186–87, 189, 190, 192, 194 Chaos theory, 1, 5 Charleston (South Carolina), 55 Chauvet cave paintings, 87 Chennai, 83 Chesbrough, Ellis, 127, 130, 131, 132, 134, 154, 160 Chicago, 57–61, 106, 127–30, 132, 133, 134–36, 154 African-Americans in, 110 Board of Sewerage Commissioners of, 129–30 Chicxulub asteroid, 197 China, 8, 122–23, 211 Great Wall of, 231 Chlorination of water supply, 143–44, 148–50 Chlorine bleach, 151 Chlorine Revolution, The (McGuire), 144 Cholera, 3, 129, 140–41, 141, 143, 145, 147, 158 Chronometers, 173, 194 Cincinnati, 182 City of the Century (Miller), 58–60 City Noise, 117 Civil rights movement, 9, 82, 112–14, 231 Civil War, 66–67, 143, 179, 251 Clark, A.


pages: 257 words: 80,100

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, Doomsday Book, Eddington experiment, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, The future is already here, time dilation, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

In the event, a feckless time-tourist steps on a butterfly: “an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time.” The butterfly effect, though, is a matter of potential only. Not every flutter in the air leaves its mark on the ages. Most fade to nothing, damped by viscosity. That was Asimov’s assumption in The End of Eternity: that the effects of tampering with history tend to die out as the centuries pass, perturbations extinguished by friction or dissipation. His Technician confidently explains: “Reality has a tendency to flow back to its original position.” But Bradbury was right and Asimov was wrong. If history is a dynamical system, it’s surely nonlinear, and the butterfly effect must obtain. At some places, some times, a slight divergence can transform history.

It is often the writers of science fiction or “speculative fiction” who give us, not only the weirdest, but the most rigorously analyzed approaches to the working of history. It all might have been different. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. I coulda been a contender. Regret is the time traveler’s energy bar. If only…something. Every writer nowadays knows about the butterfly effect. The slightest flutter might alter the course of great events. A decade before the meteorologist and chaos theorist Edward Lorenz chose the butterfly for illustrative purposes, Ray Bradbury deployed a history-changing butterfly in his 1952 story “A Sound of Thunder.” Here the time machine—the Machine, a vague mess of “silver metal” and “roaring light”—carries paying sightseers on Time Safaris back to the era of the dinosaurs.


pages: 250 words: 75,586

When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales From Neurosurgery by Frank Vertosick

butterfly effect, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, index card, medical residency, planned obsolescence, random walk, sparse data, zero-sum game

When placed in one spot, it rolls one way; placed one millimeter to the right or left of that spot, it rolls in a different direction altogether. Where the ball ends up depends entirely upon where we place it initially. The impact of the initial conditions has been named the “butterfly effect,” since, in the chaotic theory of weather, the beating of a butterfly’s wings in Asia can cause a hurricane in the southern Atlantic months later. Our lives evolve from our own butterfly effects. The tiniest perturbations in our youths, our “initial conditions,” generate profound alterations in our later lives. In my case, I had wanted to be a computer scientist, but no openings in my freshman computer-science courses existed.

What delayed my arrival at the registration office? I don’t remember—stopping for a hamburger, maybe, or speaking to a friend—but whatever this long-forgotten event was, it changed my life. If I could have taken cardiac surgery, as I had wanted, I would probably be one of the “best in the chest” now, and not a brain surgeon. The butterfly effect: a conversation here, a missed flight there…happenings which redirect the rivers of our lives. After buffeting about in the chaotic currents, I feared that I had been cast onto a distant shore, a place where I didn’t belong. Three months into my new practice, a seventy-year-old widow named Grace Catalano came to my office, pushed along in a wheelchair by her burly son.


pages: 150 words: 43,467

Maths on the Back of an Envelope: Clever Ways to (Roughly) Calculate Anything by Rob Eastaway

butterfly effect, Donald Trump, Mahatma Gandhi, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Strategic Defense Initiative, the rule of 72

In 1952, the science-fiction author Raymond Bradbury wrote a short story called ‘A Sound of Thunder’ in which a time-traveller transported back to the time of the dinosaurs accidentally kills a tiny butterfly, and this apparently innocuous incident has knock-on effects that turn out to have changed the modern world they return to. A couple of decades later, the mathematician Edward Lorenz is thought to have been referencing this story when he coined the phrase ‘the butterfly effect’ as a way to describe the unpredictable and potentially massive impact that small changes in the starting situation can have on what follows. These butterfly effects are everywhere, and they make confident long-term predictions of any kind of climate change (including political and economic climate) extremely difficult. MAD COWS AND MAD FORECASTS In 1995, Stephen Churchill, a 19-year-old from Wiltshire, became the first person to die from Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (or vCJD).


pages: 247 words: 86,844

Perfect Sound Whatever by James. Acaster

4chan, Airbnb, butterfly effect, Donald Trump, Etonian, gentrification, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Rubik’s Cube, side project

By James Acaster and available from Headline James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes For Oscar. I promise to listen to every album you ever recommend me xx Contents Title Copyright About James Acaster Praise About the Book Also By James Acaster Dedication Foreword by Matthew Crosby Perfect Sound Whatever The ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ effect Too Significant to Ignore The Greatest Album of All Time The Party Blackstar. Lemonade. Blonde. Ultralight Beam Just Like I XYZ The Visitor Adulthood in the Context of Total Noise Chapters of My Life Void Fantasy Last Evenings on Earth An Odd Entrances Not Good at Spending Time Alone First Ditch Effort City Who Speaks to You?

Within these pages lie our own lives in music: evenings alone forensically studying a single track; bus rides elevated to life-changing status through the discovery of our New Favourite Song; friendships forged over a mutual love of a wonky middle eight; that ineffable feeling that a collection of sounds assembled by a total stranger on the other side of the world is somehow speaking directly to you. If 2016 was the Greatest Year For Music Of All Time, then James Acaster is the Greatest Man for the job of convincing even the most cynical and ageing musos to sit up and listen to his truth. All he needed was a little direction. The ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ effect In 2015, iconic Compton rapper and songwriter Kendrick Lamar dropped the all-time classic To Pimp A Butterfly – an incredibly dense collection of jazz-infused hip hop with a running narrative, socio-political commentary, an inspired selection of samples and tight instrumentals performed by a stellar lineup of sought-after musicians.

‘Brutally honest and relentlessly funny.’ Adam Kay, author of ‘This is Going to Hurt’ Get your copy here Table of Contents Title Copyright About James Acaster Praise for James Acaster About the Book Also By James Acaster Dedication Contents Foreword by Matthew Crosby Perfect Sound Whatever The ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ effect Too Significant to Ignore The Greatest Album of All Time The Party Blackstar. Lemonade. Blonde. Ultralight Beam Just Like I XYZ The Visitor Adulthood in the Context of Total Noise Chapters of My Life Void Fantasy Last Evenings on Earth An Odd Entrances Not Good at Spending Time Alone First Ditch Effort City Who Speaks to You?


pages: 401 words: 93,256

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

We should never forget that our need for logic and certainty brings costs as well as benefits. The need to appear scientific in our methodology may prevent us from considering other, less logical and more magical solutions, which can be cheap, fast-acting and effective. The mythical ‘butterfly effect’ does exist, but we don’t spend enough time butterfly hunting. Here are some recent butterfly effect discoveries, from my own experience: A website adds a single extra option to its checkout procedure – and increases sales by $300m per year. An airline changes the way in which flights are presented – and sells £8m more of premium seating per year.

However, as I warned at the beginning of this book, this will not necessarily make life easier – it is much easier to be fired for being illogical than for being unimaginative.* The chart below describes the consequences of different modes of decision-making, whether things go right or wrong. Why we need to spend more time and energy hunting for butterfly effects. Large organisations are not set up to reward creative thinking. As the chart shows, the greatest risks result from an imaginative approach, so it seems safer to act logically. However, it is the job of the alchemist to explore the upper half of this chart occasionally – and managers should give their staff permission and unwavering support when they do so.


pages: 317 words: 100,414

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

High school science tells us that clouds form when water vapor coalesces around dust particles. This sounds simple but exactly how a particular cloud develops—the shape it takes—depends on complex feedback interactions among droplets. To capture these interactions, computer modelers need equations that are highly sensitive to tiny butterfly-effect errors in data collection. So even if we learn all that is knowable about how clouds form, we will not be able to predict the shape a particular cloud will take. We can only wait and see. In one of history’s great ironies, scientists today know vastly more than their colleagues a century ago, and possess vastly more data-crunching power, but they are much less confident in the prospects for perfect predictability.

In my EPJ research in the late 1980s, I had the experts forecast whether the Communist Party would remain in power in the Soviet Union, whether there would be a violent overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, and whether Quebec would separate from Canada. After the deadlines for three forecasts passed, and the correct answers were clear—no, no, and no—I asked the experts to consider the plausibility of counterfactual scenarios, in which small butterfly-effect tweaks caused history to unfold differently. When the what-iffery implied that their failed forecast would have turned out right—for example, if the coup against Gorbachev in 1991 had been better planned and the plotters had been less drunk and better organized, the Communist Party would still be in power—the experts tended to welcome the what-if tale like an old friend.

The correct interpretation is much harder to wrap our heads around: when meteorologists quantify the weather conditions around Berlin right now and plug in their best models, the equations assign a 30% probability to rain tomorrow. Or another way to look at it, using Lorenzian computer simulations: if we could rerun the weather in Berlin thousands of times, with minor butterfly-effect tweaks for measurement error in antecedent conditions like winds and barometric pressures, it would rain in 30% of the computer-simulated worlds. Small wonder that Berliners resort to more concrete simplifications. 12. David Leonhardt, “How Not to Be Fooled by Odds,” New York Times, October 15, 2014. 13.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of … observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be nonexistent. Lorenz was writing about the atmosphere, yet his conclusions apply broadly to complex systems. Lorenz’s research is the source of the famous butterfly effect in which a hurricane is caused by a butterfly’s wings flapping thousands of miles away. The butterfly effect is good science. The difficulty is that not every butterfly causes a hurricane, and not every hurricane is caused by butterflies. Still, it’s useful to know that hurricanes emerge unexpectedly for unforeseen reasons. The same is true of market meltdowns.

Market participants must forecast continually to optimize trading strategies and asset allocations. Forecasting capital markets is treacherous because they do not behave according to the Markovian stochastics widely used on Wall Street. A Markov chain has no memory; capital markets do. Capital markets produce surprises, no different from the butterfly effect identified by Lorenz in 1960. Since 2009 I have achieved superior results using complexity and Bayes to navigate the uncharted waters of systemic risk. A simple application of Bayes’ theorem can provide insights into otherwise secret understandings. A good example is the Shanghai Accord. This was the understanding reached among the United States, China, Japan, and the Eurozone on the sidelines of the G20 meeting of finance ministers and central banks in Shanghai on February 26, 2016.


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Unfortunately, while “almost” might work for horseshoes and hand grenades, 30 years after Godel and Heisenberg yet a third limitation of our knowledge was in the wings, a limitation that would close the door on any attempt to block out the implications of microscopic uncertainty on predictability in our macroscopic world. Based on observations made by Edward Lorenz in the early 1960s and popularized by the so-called butterfly effect—the fanciful notion that the beating wings of a butterfly could change the predictions of an otherwise perfect weather forecasting system—this limitation arises because in some important cases immeasurably small errors can compound over time to limit prediction in the larger scale. Half a century after the limits of measurement and thus of physical knowledge were demonstrated by Heisenberg in the world of quantum mechanics, Lorenz piled on a result that showed how microscopic errors could propagate to have a stultifying impact in nonlinear dynamic systems.

Half a century after the limits of measurement and thus of physical knowledge were demonstrated by Heisenberg in the world of quantum mechanics, Lorenz piled on a result that showed how microscopic errors could propagate to have a stultifying impact in nonlinear dynamic systems. This limitation could come into the forefront only with the dawning of the computer age, because it is manifested in the subtle errors of computational accuracy. The essence of the butterfly effect is that small perturbations can have large repercussions in massive, random forces such as weather. Edward Lorenz was a professor of meteorology at MIT, and in 1961 he was testing and tweaking a model of weather dynamics on a rudimentary vacuumtube computer. The program was based on a small system of simultaneous equations, but seemed to provide an inkling into the variability of weather patterns.

This is a point made by John Danaher in the introduction to Brazilian JiuJitsu: Theory and Technique, by Renzo Gracie and Royler Gracie with Kid Peligro and John Danaher (Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities Press, 2001). 270 bindex.qxd 7/13/07 2:44 PM Page 271 INDEX Accidents/organizations, 159–161 Accountants, failure (reasons), 135 Accounting conventions, problems, 138 Accounting orientation, 137–138 Adaptation, best measure, 232–233 Adverse selection, 191–192 American depositary receipts (ADRs), 68 America Online (AOL), 139 Amex Major Market Index (XMI) futures, 12 Analytically driven funds, 248 Analytical Proprietary Trading (APT), 44–45 initiation, 189 remnant, form, 190 A Programming Language (APL), 43–47 asset, problem, 45 Armstrong, Michael, 130 Arthur Andersen, failure, 135 Artificial markets, 229 Asia Crisis (1997), 3, 115 Asian currency crisis, 114 Asian economies, 118 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), 63 Assets class, hedge fund classification, 245 direction, hedge fund classification, 246 Asynchronous pricing, 225 AT&T Wireless Services IPO, SSB underwriting, 130 Back-office functions, 39 Bacon, Louis, 165 Bamberger, Gerry, 185–187, 251 Bankers Trust lawsuit, 38 purchase announcement, 75 Bank exposure, 146–147 Bank failures, 146 Bank of Japan, objectives/strategies, 166 Baptist Foundation, restatements/liability, 135 Barings (bank) bankruptcy, 39 clerical trading error, 38–39 derivatives cross-trading, 143 Beard, Anson, 13 Beder, Tanya, 204 Behavior, economic theory, 231 Berens, Rod, 73 Bernard, Lewis, 42, 52 Biggs, Barton, 11 Black, Fischer, 9 Black Monday (1929), 17 Black-Scholes formula, 9, 252 Block desk, 184–185 trading positions, 186 Bond positions, hedging, 30 Booth, David, 29 Breakdowns, explanation, 5–6 Broker-dealer block-trading desk, usage, 184 price setting role, 213–214 Bucket shop era, 177 Buffett, Warren, 62, 99, 181, 198 arb unit closure, 87–88 Bushnell, Dave, 129–131 Butterfly effect, essence, 227 Capital cushions, 106 Capitalism, 250 Cash futures, 251 arbitrageurs, 19, 23 spread, 19 trade, 19 Cerullo, Ed, 41 Cheapest-to-deliver bond, 251 Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), 252 Black-Scholes formula, impact, 9–10 Citigroup Associates First Capital Corporation, 128 consolidation, impact, 132–134 Japanese private banking arm, 133 management change, Fed reaction, 133 organizational complexity/structural uncertainty, 126 Citron, Robert, 38 Coarse behavior benefits, 232–233 consistency, 236–237 271 bindex.qxd 7/13/07 2:44 PM Page 272 INDEX Coarse behavior (Continued) decision rules, 233 in humans, 235–237 measurement of, 238–239 response based on, 236 rules, optimality, 238 Cockroach example, 232–233, 235 Collateral, usage, 218 Collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs), 71–75, 250 Commercial Credit, Primerica purchase, 126 Competitive prices, 36 Complexity by-product, 143 implications, 156 importance, 144–146 Consumer lending violations, Federal Reserve fine, 132 Control-oriented risk management, 200 Convergence Capital, 80 Convergence trades, 122 Convertible bond (CB) strategy, 57–58 Cooke, Bill, 185–187 Corporate defaults, possibility, 29–30 Corporate political risk, 140 Corrigan, Gerald, 196–198 Countervailing trades, 213 Credit Suisse First Boston, 72–73 Crises, causes, 240 da Vinci, Leonardo, 136 Denham, Bob, 62–63, 99, 195 Derivatives customization, 143 trading strategy, 30 Deterministic nonperiodic flow, 228 Detroit Edison, Fermi-1 experimental breeder reactor, 161–164 Deutsche Bank, investment banking (problems), 72–73 Dimon, Jamie, 77–78, 91, 97–98, 126 Distressed debt, event risk, 248–249 Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), 2, 12 Dynamic hedge, 12, 161 Dynamic system, 228–229 Ebbers, Bernard, 70 Economic catastrophe, 257 Efficient markets hypothesis, 211 Einstein, Albert, 224–226 Emerging market bonds, 71 Enron restatements/liability, 135 U.S.


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

For her part, Barnard says her hours of playing with the map led her to a surprising epiphany: It’s actually easier to make a gerrymandered map than a fair one. Unbalanced districts aren’t purely a result of greed and deceit. Even honest-minded attempts to alter a district can produce unexpectedly bad results, in a butterfly effect. You might try to make district A more fair by siphoning off households from district B, only to find it inadvertantly makes districts C and D and F more gerrymandered. It was a nuanced political analysis that stemmed from hands-on experience instead of abstraction. I ask Barnard how long it would have taken her to redistrict the state if she hadn’t had the software.

Or you could pick a seemingly simple instruction—go forward ten steps, turn right ninety degrees, increase the number of steps by five, then repeat over and over—and discover it produced something unexpected: a square spiral, growing eternally larger. The children began to grasp the concept of recursion, the idea that complexity emerges from repeating a simple procedure over and over. They also began to intuit the butterfly effect: how changing one tiny part of a program can radically alter the outcome. If you tweak one element in that square-spiral program, making the angle ninety-five degrees instead of ninety, surprise: The squares will shift slightly, producing a new creation, looking like a spiral galaxy. And ninety-seven degrees looks different, too.

See also attention/focus; cognition; memory and problem-solving, 72 understanding, limits of, 14–15 brainstorming, 164 Brandt, Deborah, 50–52 Breaking Bad (TV show), 94–95, 102 Bridle, James, 70–71 Briggs, Charles F., 6 Briggs, Henry, 59 Brown, John Seely, 195 Building Maker, 171 Bürgi, Joost, 59 Burt, Dorothy, 184–86 Bush, Vannevar, 123, 143 butterfly effect, 191 Buxton, Arthur, 92 Cadwell, Courtney, 181–83 Capablanca, José Raúl, 3 Carmichael, Alexandra, 90 Carpenter, Matthew, 175–76 Carr, Nicholas, 12, 14, 136 “Cartoons Against Corruption,” 275 Carvin, Andy, 214–15 Cassiopedia, 260 Ceglowski, Maciej, 154–55 centaur, 3–6, 284 Cha, Meeyoung, 234–35 Chain, Ernest, 64 Change.org, 265 “Character of a Coffee-House,” 223 Cheever, Charlie, 74–75 chess Deep Blue supercomputer, 1–2, 5, 9–10, 280, 284 human/machine collaboration, 3–5, 284 humans versus machines, 1–6, 16 improving game and digital tools, 17–18 Kasparov versus online collective, 161–62 children.


pages: 239 words: 68,598

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Garrett Hardin, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Northern Rock, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, quantum entanglement, short selling, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, Virgin Galactic

The first indication that this was too good to be true came in 1890 when Henri Poincaré studied the interaction of three bodies held together by gravity while orbiting in space; he found that the behaviour of the system was wholly unpredictable. This was a serious flaw in the concept of determinism, but it was not until 1961 that Lorenz used an early computer to demonstrate the chaotic behaviour of weather and found it to be wholly unpredictable beyond about a week. He was the originator of the ‘butterfly effect’ – the idea that the small eddy made by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could initiate much later a hurricane; he showed that this was because weather systems are highly sensitive to the initial conditions of their origin. May found that computer models of population growth showed similar chaotic behaviour, especially in biological systems containing more than two species; these discoveries stirred great interest among mathematicians and scientists in the nature of deterministic chaos.

Norton, New York, 1988) James Lovelock, Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (1991), reprinted as Gaia: Medicine for an Ailing Planet (Gaia Books, London, 2005) James Lovelock, Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist (Oxford University Press, 2000) Index bold numbers refer to tables, italic numbers to figures adaptation 48, 49, 104 aerosol, atmospheric 35–8, 40 agribusiness 9, 86, 144, 146 agriculture, greenhouse gas 47 albedo, reduction of 46, 47, 163 algae 29, 33, 163 CLAW hypothesis 111, 116 ocean fertilization 98 Amsterdam Declaration 117, 165 Andreae, Meinrat 36, 94, 111, 116 anti-nuclear propaganda 70–76 Arctic, loss of ice 7, 10–11, 28 Bali, UN Climate Change Conference 4, 16, 47 belief, anecdotal 52–3, 73 Betts, Richard 38, 42 Bhopal industrial accident 72–3 biodiversity 115 biofuel crops 12–13 biogeochemistry 31, 121 biologists, and Gaia 119 Bolin, Bert 3, 120 Brand, Stewart 79, 111 Branson, Sir Richard 2 breathing, greenhouse gas emissions 47 British Antarctic Survey 42 Broecker, Wally, Fixing Climate 11, 97 Brown, Gordon 90 ‘butterfly effect’ 132 C4 plants 155 Caldeira, Ken 94, 95, 110, 112 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 74, 146 carbon dioxide burial 77, 96 effect on model Earth 34–5 and energy production 69 Eocene increase 101–2 production by population 47 reduction of 32, 33 regulation 108–10, 112 removal by algae 29, 33, 98 sequestration 96–9 carbon footprint 18, 48 carbon trading 48, 50 Carson, Rachel 143–5 CFCs 137, 145 chaos, deterministic 132–3, 164 Chapman Conferences 120 char, burial 58, 99–100 Charlson, Robert 15, 36, 38, 94, 111, 116 Chernobyl nuclear accident 71, 72–3 China, pollution 37 CLAW hypothesis 111, 116 climatologists, and Gaia 120 clouds artificial 95–6 CLAW hypothesis 111, 116 condensation nuclei 95, 111 effect on climate 35–8 coal 79, 83 combined heat and power generation 79 Common Agricultural Policy 90 Common Energy Policy 90 computers 130 Connes, Janine 107 Connes, Pierre 107 Cool Earth 97 Coombe Mill 136–43 ecosystem 139 grass-burning boiler 138 horticulture 140 tree planting 139 countryside, destruction of 9, 144 Cox, Peter 36, 42 Crane, Robert, The Earth System 110 Crichton, Michael, A State of Fear 147 Crutzen, Paul 94, 95 Daisyworld model 111, 112–14, 115 Dale, Sir Henry 15 Daniel, Billy 143 Darwinism 6, 31, 115, 119, 127–8, 131 Dasgupta, Sir Partha 5 Dawkins, Richard 111, 128, 153 DDT 147 Descartes, René 127, 130, 131, 158–9 deserts, solar thermal energy 66–7 determinism 132–3 Dickinson, Robert 42 dimethyl sulphide 98, 111, 116 disequilibrium 107, 112 dissonance, cognitive 25, 44 Doolittle, Ford 111 drought 10, 54–5 Dyke, James 115 Earth ageing 154 atmosphere 105, 107, 111–12 catastrophes 52, 152–3, 154 effect of carbon dioxide 34–5 hot state 2, 4, 34, 35, 118 human carrying capacity 56 as living system 7, 8–9, 47, 62, 165, 166 surface temperature 39 eco-warriors 21 Ehrlich, Ann 49 Ehrlich, Paul 49 electricity dependence on 16, 17, 88–9 production 65, 68 Electron Capture Detector (ECD) 145 energy 64–86 and political power 75–6 renewable 12, 80–85, 142 Eocene, climate 101–2, 104 Erikson, Brent 13 European Union, renewable energy policy 90 evapotranspiration 37, 38 evolution, Darwinian 6, 31, 115, 119, 127–8, 131 extremophiles 155 Farman, Joseph 42 feedback 167–8 climate models 34, 35, 100–101 ecosystems 38 Fells, Professor Ian 65 Festiger, Leon 25 fire 149–51 Flannery, Timothy 128 The Weather Makers 19 flooding 50 food production, greenhouse gas 47 supply 86–91 synthesized 16, 87, 100 forecasting climate change 23–45 forests clearance 97 evapotranspiration 38 fossil fuels 64, 77–80 Gaia naming by William Golding 1, 106, 128–9 perception of 126–7 see also Earth, as living system Gaia Theory, history 105–22, 166 Gardiner, Brian 42 Garrels, Robert 110 gas, natural 78–9, 83 genes, ‘selfish’ 153 geochemistry 108–10 geoengineering 92–104 Geological Society of London, 2003 Wollaston Medal 120 geologists, and Gaia 110, 119 geophysics 32 geophysiology 31, 100–102 global dimming 36, 102 Golding, William 1, 106, 128–9 Goodell, Jeff 80 Gore, Al 4, 15, 128 Gray, John 6 green ideology 12, 142–7 greenhouse condition 33, 101, 166 greenhouse gas 4, 47 Greenpeace 20, 74, 146 Greenspan, Alan 5 Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research 36, 38, 42 Hamilton, William 115, 128, 153 Hansen, James 3, 5, 15 carbon dioxide reduction 32 scientific reticence 74 Hardin, Garrett 62 Harvey, Inman 115 Hayes, P.


pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

It’s the law.”5 In theory, couldn’t the demon imagined by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814, who knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, plug them into equations for the laws of physics and predict the future perfectly? In reality, there are two ways in which a law-governed world can generate events that for all intents and purposes are random. One of them is familiar to popular science readers: the butterfly effect, named after the possibility that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could trigger a tornado in Texas. Butterfly effects can arise in deterministic nonlinear dynamical systems, also known as “chaos,” where minuscule differences in initial conditions, too small for any instrument to measure, can feed on themselves and blow up into gargantuan effects.

., 264 base rates change in, 167 conditional probabilities and, 134, 138–39, 141 conjunction probabilities and, 130 forbidden, 62, 163–66 neglect of, 154–57, 349–50nn6,27 as priors in Bayesian reasoning, 167–69 random sampling, 168 as reference class, 167 relevance of, 167–68 Baumeister, Roy, 124 Bayesian reasoning base-rate neglect, 154–57, 349–50nn6,27 base-rates, forbidden, 62, 163–66 causal Bayesian networks, 260–63, 261, 263 changes in base rates, 167 credence in a hypothesis, 151 definition, 149–50, 151 equation for, 151–53 “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” 159, 161 forecasting and, 162–63 medicine and, 150–51, 152, 153–54, 167, 169–70, 321 and miracles, argument against, 158–59 morality of, 166–69 myside bias and, 297 numerical calculation of, 154 odds, 159 political commentary and, 162–63 posterior probability, 151, 153 random sampling of examples, 168 reference class, 167–68 reframing of single-event probabilities into frequencies, 168–70, 349–50n27 replicability crisis and, 159–61 San people and, 4, 166 Signal Detection Theory and, 202, 205, 213, 214, 351n6 subjectivist probability and, 115, 151 updating, 157–58 visualization of, 170–71 —“likelihood” term in equation, 152–54 bell curves as plot of, 205, 205, 351 definition, 152, 351n6, 352n6, 352n21 statistical significance as, 224–25, 352n21 —“marginal” term in equation, 153–54 —“prior” term in equation, 152–53 base rates used as, problems with, 167–69 low priors, and decreased credence, 157–63 low priors, and signal detection, 213, 214 myside bias and, 297 Bayes, Reverend Thomas, 151, 158 Beccaria, Cesare, 332–33 begging the question, 89 beliefs distal vs. testable, 298–99 factually unsupported, 300, 301–3, 304 imposed by force, 43–44, 245–46, 290 justified true, 36–37, 344n1 realist vs. mythological, 298–303 reflective vs. intuitive, 298–99 bell curve, 204–5 Central Limit Theorem and, 205, 351n5 fat-tailed, 204–5 regression to the mean and, 253 signal noise detection and, 206–11, 219 Belling the Cat, 231, 232 Bem, Daryl, 159–60 Bentham, Jeremy, 333–35 The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker), 183–84 Bezos, Jeff, 251 bias bias, 291 biased assimilation, 290–91 biased evaluation, 291, 294 Biden, Joe, 6, 130 Black Lives Matter, 26, 124–25 Blackstone, William, 217–18 Bodin, Jean, 335 bounded rationality, 184–88 Boy or Girl paradox, 137 brain, vs. deep learning networks, 107–9 Breyer, Stephen, 191 broken-leg problem, 279–80 Bruine de Bruin, Wändi, 323–24 burden of proof fallacy, 89 Bush, George W., 11, 218 Butler, Judith, 90 butterfly effect, 114 Calvin, John, 330–31 Carlin, George, 283, 299 Carroll, Lewis, 38, 75, 96, 225 Carroll, Sean, 160 Castellio, Sebastian, 330–31 Categorical Imperative (Kant), 69 causation all-or-none fallacy, 269 conditions and, 259, 260 confounding (epiphenomena), 246, 257, 260, 263, 265 confounding, ruling out, 267–68, 270–71 counterfactuals, 64, 257, 259, 264 definition, 256–57 fundamental problem of, 258 mechanisms, 258–59 overdetermination and, 259, 260 paradoxes of, 259–61, 260 preemption and, 259, 260 probabilistic, 259–60 reverse causation, 246, 263, 267, 269–70 San people and awareness of, 3, 4–5 temporal stability, 258 unit homogeneity, 258 See also randomized controlled trial —causal networks overview, 260 Bayesian networks, 260–63, 261, 263 causal chain, 261–62, 261 causal collider fallacy, 261, 262–63 causal fork, 261, 262 endogeneity, 263 Matthew Effect, 263–64, 354n21 multicollinearity, 263 unpredictability of human behavior and, 280–81 —multiple causes overview, 272–73 interacting causes, 273–76, 273–74 interaction, 273, 275, 277–78 main effect, 273, 274, 275, 278 nature and nurture, 273, 275–77, 276 regression equations and, 278 talent and practice, 272–73, 277–78, 278 Chagnon, Napoleon, 307 chaos, 114 Chapman, Loren and Jean, 251 cheater detection, 15–16 chemtrails, 299 chess, 277–78, 278 Chicken game, 59–61, 235–36, 237, 344n29 children adoption of, 63 heights of, 252–54 IQs of, 252–53 low birth weights, 262–63 probability of boy vs. girl at birth, 128–29, 132–33, 136–38 ultimate vs. proximate goals and, 46–47 China, 24 choice architecture, 56 Chomsky, Noam, 71, 90 CIA, 91 Circe, 53, 55 circular explanations, 89 Clark, Sally, 129–30 Clegg, Liam, 231 climate change availability bias and perception of energy sources, 121–22, 347n22 avoidance of sectarian symbolism, 312 discounting the future and, 51–52 game theory and, 227–28, 242–44 Public Goods games and, 242–43, 244 —denial of argument from authority and, 90, 91 credibility of universities and, 314 openness to evidence vs., 311 politicization of, 295, 310, 312 Trump and, 284 clinical vs. actuarial judgment, 278–80 Clinton, Bill, 25, 101 Clinton, Hillary, 82, 117, 285, 299, 306 close-mindedness.


pages: 600 words: 72,502

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

They don’t have zero impact, just not a linear or predictable one. This idea was captured in the fanciful title of a 1972 speech by one of the pioneers of chaos theory, mathematician Edward Lorenz: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” Following his speech, this idea became known as “the butterfly effect,” which is meant to signify how the causal relationships between factors in a system can be entirely mysterious and nonlinear. Ever since, chaos and complexity theorists have been studying ways to better understand the nonlinear workings of natural systems. The inability of economists to forecast complex economic systems suggests strongly that the economy’s input-output relationships are nonlinear.

Index AARP, 192 activist investors, 155, 158–159 adaptation, 82–83, 84, 103–106, 129–130, 142–143 AdSense, 154 Advanced Micro Devices, 129 Affordable Care Act, 92 agricultural workers, 192 Ahir, Hites, 82 almond industry, 73–75 Alphabet, 134 Amazon, 134, 192 American Dream, 2 American International Group (AIG), 137 analogic reasoning, 25–26 Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI), 123–124 anomalies, 111–112 antitrust legislation, 53–56, 152, 153 Apple iOS, 131 Argyris, Chris, 167, 178 Aristotle, 183 Aspen Publishers, 77 AT&T, 53–54, 130–131 Atlanta testing scandal, 45–46, 53 Australia, 206 auto exports, 151 Avishai, Ellie, 171 Bain & Company, 175 balance, 183–184 balanced scorecard, 129 Bank Act (Canada), 139, 143 bank bailouts, 137–138 Bank Holding Company Act, 108 bankruptcies, 97–98, 137 banks, 137–142, 151 baseball, 101–102 Bass, Jo Ann, 116, 118 Belgium, 157 bell curve, 33, 72 See also Gaussian distribution Bernanke, Ben, 78, 79 bid-ask spreads, 55–56 Bieber, Justin, 65 Black Monday, 52 Blue Chip Economic Indicators forecast, 77–78, 82 bond market, 109–111 bond-rating agencies, 109–111 Boston Consulting Group, 175 Box, George, 25 boycotts, 189, 192 Bracken, Michael, 147–149 Bridgewater Associates, 31 Bristol University, 184 budgets, 124, 126, 173, 199–200 Buffett, Warren, 157 Bush, George W., 30 business adaptation in, 129–130 proxies in, 49–53 business executives, 113 agenda for, 115–135 backgrounds of, 120–121 reductionism and, 121–122 business models, 27–29 business schools, 32, 174–176, 180 business siloes, 32, 122 business strategy, 175–176 butterfly effect, 81 buycotts, 189, 192 buying groups, 192 buy recommendations, 112–113 cable TV, 130, 131 Canada antitrust policies in, 55 financial system of, 138–142, 151 metaphor for, 26 voter registration in, 205–206 capital efficiency, 97–99 capitalism, 4, 12 See also democratic capitalism discontent with, 12–13 survival of, 210 capital markets, 50, 55, 85, 86, 99, 109–110, 112, 129, 155 capital-markets policy, 55 Cargill, 133 cash flows, 97–98 central limit theorem, 35, 60 certainty, teaching, 170–173, 181, 185 Chambers, John, 51–52 chaos theory, 81 Chavez, Cesar, 192 Chicago Board of Trade, 64, 90 chief executive officers (CEOs), 64, 86–88, 121, 155 See also business executives China, 151, 210 Churchill, Winston, 26 circuit-breaker system, 108 Cisco Systems, 51–52 citizens, 114 agenda for, 187–207 collective action by, 192–197, 207 engagement of, 198–201 interviews of, 147–148 model of, 145 passive, 198 purchasing power of, 188–192, 207 reciprocal political relationships and, 197–200 responsibility of, 189–190 voting by, 201–206 civil-law system, 105–106 Clayton Antitrust Act, 53 Clinton, Bill, 54 cloud computing, 131 clustered industries, 67–70 collapsing sand pile example, 61–62 collective action, 192–197, 207 college students, 172–173 commercial banks, 108 common-law system, 105–106 communism, 15 comparative advantage, 40–41, 56 compensation theory, 146 competition, 63–65, 131–135, 151 competition policy, 53–54 competitive advantage, 67, 71 Competitive Advantage of Nations, The (Porter), 17, 67 complex adaptive systems, 80, 176–178, 182, 211–212 See also natural systems complexity design for, 100–103 teaching about, 176–177 complexity theory, 61–62, 81 Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 31, 78, 79 connectedness, 106–113 consensus estimates, 86, 87 Consensus Forecasts, 82 consolidation See also mergers industry, 71–73 consumer protection, 54 continuous adaptation, 82–83, 105–106 Contract with America, 198, 199 Costco, 125 Cowan, George, 177 Crawford, Cindy, 64, 65 creativity-intensive jobs, 68–70 Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT), 45–46 customer experience, 117, 122–123 customer feedback, 130, 135 customer loyalty, 27–29, 48 customer value, 130 Dalio, Ray, 31 Darwin, Charles, 129–130 data directly observable, 178–181 interpretation of, 172, 178–179 Data Resources Inc.


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Variations of the SEIR epidemic model can be chaotic, as has been shown and studied mathematically and related to actual disease data.21 Chaos theory is associated with the butterfly effect, which refers to the idea that a huge, apparently unpredictable storm might have been generated by a seemingly distant and irrelevant event such as a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the planet long ago. Another variation of the SIR model can help explain such butterfly effects by adding information cascades to the basic model.22 If people think they are collecting reliable information by observing the numbers of people who make certain choices, then the equilibrium can move off in random directions, much as in the artificial music-market experiment of Salganik and his colleagues discussed in chapter 4.

., 33 Brown, Roger, 307n13 Bruner, Jerome, 65 Bryan, William Jennings, 108, 164, 167–68, 170, 171, 172, 313n29 Buffett, Warren, 4 Burns, Arthur F., 125, 309n10 Bush, George W., 83, 154–55 business confidence narrative, 114–15, 116f, 118–19; conventional economists’ view and, xvi–xvii; gold standard and, 167, 168–69; stimulated by Bitcoin narrative, 4 business cycle, 124–25, 271. See also economic fluctuations butterfly effect, 299–300 buy-and-hold strategy, xiii “Buy Now Campaign” during Great Depression, 255 Callahan, Charlene, 281 Canada, National Dream, 151; Bank of Canada, 156 Čapek, Karel, 181–82, 203 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 150, 210–11 capitalism: Bitcoin narrative and, 87; triumphant narrative of, 29 Capper, Arthur, 249 The Captive Mind (Milosz), 57 Carroll, Lewis, 188 Case, Karl, 216, 226, 285 Case-Shiller home price index, 216, 222 Cass, David, 74 Cassel, Gustav, 188 causality between narratives and events, 71–74; controlled experiments and, 72–73, 77–79; vs. correlation, 286; direction of, 71, 72–74; economists’ presumption about, 73, 76–77; flashbulb memory and, 80; for recessions and depressions in US, 112.


pages: 511 words: 139,108

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, coherent worldview, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Johannes Kepler, Occam's razor, phenotype, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Turing machine

One reason why the significance of this had not been appreciated is that no one expected the computer prediction of interesting physical phenomena to be especially easy. Take weather {200} forecasting or earthquake prediction, for instance. Although the relevant equations are known, the difficulty of applying them in realistic situations is notorious. This has recently been brought to public attention in popular books and articles on chaos and the 'butterfly effect'. These effects are not responsible for the intractability that Feynman had in mind, for the simple reason that they occur only in classical physics - that is, not in reality, since reality is quantum-mechanical. Nevertheless, I want to make some remarks here about 'chaotic' classical motions, if only to highlight the quite different characters of classical and quantum unpredictability.

abstraction 222�7, 232, 236, 238, 240�43, 245, 246, 248, 253, 255 ������represented by physical object 241�3 accuracy 122 ������and image generators 110 ������perfect 110, 122, 131 ������and reliability of proof 241 ������and time travel 308 ������of a virtual�reality rendering 113, 114, 117, 292, 294, 295, 318, 348, 357 ������of virtual reality is not verifiable 125, 243�4 adaptation 193, 315, 332�3, 334, 340, 347 ������degrees of 173, 174, 180, 188, 190, 191 ������and 'design' 333 ������and knowledge 69, 181, 316, 317, 345 ������multiverse view of 187�192, 190, 317 ������origin of 334 Adelman, Leonard 215 aesthetics 363, 364 ������must be objective 364 amino acids 171 'angel' theory of planetary motion 66, 85, 88�9 anomaly 152�6, 158�61, 185, 321 anthropic reasoning 138 Appel, Kenneth 249 architects ������and virtual�reality buildings 101, 127 ������master�builder 13�15, 358�9 argument 68, 75, 76, 84, 148 ������diagonal see diagonal argument ������and explanation 75, 165 ������and justification 146, 147 ������in mathematics 236 ������observations and 69, 75 ������philosophical 84 ������and the principles of rationality 163 ������rational 159 ������scientific 64, 76 ������sequential 67, 165 ������is unlike proof 165 ������winning an 150 Aristotle 167�70, 229�30, 233, 245, 254 arithmetic 10, 133, 215�16, 223, 230, 134 artificial intelligence 289, 302, 331, 335, 336, 356�7 {371} The Ascent of Man (Bronowski) 73 astrology 70, 186, 332 astronomy 63, 95, 169, 177, 344 astrophysics 8, 12, 13, 20, 344 Augustine, St 258 autonomous 87, 88, 91, 102 backtracking ������in problem�solving 67, 365 Barrow, John 185�6 behaviourism 80 Bennett, Charles 218 Berkeley, Bishop 86, 101, 102 ������and virtual reality 101 Big Bang 18, 19, 27, 96, 186, 284, 286, 311, 349, 357 Big Crunch 162, 186, 284, 348, 349, 351, 355 biochemistry 20, 170, 176 biology 20, 28, 169, 170, 171, 176, 178, 193, 331 biosphere 169, 177, 186, 318, 333, 340 bits 211, 212, 272, 214 black dwarf 183 black holes 12, 107, 284, 286, 311, 312, 315 ������and time travel 312 The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins) 334 block universe see spacetime Bohm, David 93, 335 Bohr, Niels 327, 328 Boswell, James 86, 101 Brahe, Tycho 95 brain 11, 52, 57, 58, 95, 108, 109, 193, 253, 254, 301, 307, 308 ������and computation 238, 239, 249 ������and computers 124�5, 238, 337 ������as fallible 71, 244 ������interception of nerve signals in, 113 ������and knowledge 121, 164, 338 ������as part of the natural world 236 ������is not a quantum computer 238 ������and solipsism 80 ������speed of 124�5, 290, 291 ������stopping and starting 126 ������and the Turing principle 164, 237, 303, 336 ������virtual�reality programs in 118, 121, 136, 181 Brassard, Gilles 218 Brave New World (Huxley) 99, 109 breadth 15, 16, 69, 70, 344�5, 366 Bronowski, Jacob 73 Brouwer, Luitzen Egbertus Jan 231, 240 buildings ������collapsing 14 ������futuristic 14, 358�9 ������virtual reality 101, 127 'butterfly effect' 202�3 calculus 228 calendars see clocks and calendars cannon�ball, and laws of motion 25�6, 26 Cantgotu environments see under environment Cantor, Georg 126, 128, 234 cards, pack of 211 cause 24, 265�70, 272�6, 285�6, 287, 338�9 ������common sense and 269 ������and explanation 24, 265 ������and the flow of time 265�6 ������and jigsaw puzzle 273 ������not mere predictability 272�4 ������of replication 172�4, 274 celestial sphere 68, 77, 88, 169 certainty 225, 231, 233, 236, 240, 241, 243, 244, 247, 252, 253, 256 ������see also justification ������absolute 224, 227, 230, 238 change ������after a choice 309 ������changing the past 309 ������impossible in spacetime 268, 338 ������and quantum�mechanical laws of motion 211�12 {372} ������with time 259, 263, 268 ������in time travel 300 chaos 201�3, 209, 213, 220, 351 chemistry 20, 169�70, 344 chess 137�9, 242 chicken story (Russell) 60�61 Church, Alonzo 131, 133, 252 Church�Turing conjecture 131�2 ������see also Turing principle Churchill, Winston 22 circles 56, 75, 77, 226�7, 240�44 Clarke, Arthur C. 138 clocks and calendars 267, 272, 280, 282�3, 283, 289�91, 296�8, 300, 304, 319 ������biological 167 ������brain's 124�5, 352 ������in parallel universes 278, 280 ������in time travel 290, 291, 296 cloud motion 63 cogito ergo sum argument 81, 346 coin�tossing 280�83, 281, 287, 307 common sense ix, 63, 78, 141 ������and cause and effect 265�6 ������concept of time 141, 258�61, 259, 263, 265, 267, 271 ������and free will 269 ������idea of a single universe 141, 328�9 ������idea that consciousness 'moves' through time 141, 262�3 ������notions of force and inertia 78 ������as often false ix, 74, 78 ������realism and 74, 83, 84 ������and scientific reasoning 74, 78, 267 ������and the theory of the growth of knowledge 61, 141 compact discs 109, 110 complexity 11, 21, 333, 338, 346, 357, 364 ������across universes 190, 191, 345 ������and Dr Johnson's criterion for reality 90, 91, 207 ������explanations and 90�91 ������unnecessary 78 ������theory of 91, 97, 197�8, 345 comprehensibility ������and emergence 20�21, 30 ������and the laws of physics 135, 136, 197, 345 ������and solipsism 80, 136�9 ������of the world 17, 134�5, 138, 238, 240, 255, 344, 346, 351, 354, 365 ������of what is known 2, 17, 28�9 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al.) 258�9, 259 computable 132, 133�4, 357 computation ������as an emergent phenomenon 21 ������analogue 250 ������classical 131�2, 210�11 ������by quantum computers 132, 209�19 ������evolution as a 197 ������exponential 200, 208, 220 ������and the inter�universe 'trade' in knowledge 317�18 ������intractable tasks 198, 199, 200, 206�9, 214, 220, 221, 251, 357, 362 ������in parallel universes 216�17 ������proof as a type of 246 ������quantum 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 238, 331, 366 ������quantum physics implicit in classical 211, 212�13 ������quantum theory of 193, 211, 214, 216, 219, 330, 335, 345 ������simple 92 ������speed of 124, 126, 194, 352, 365 ������substantial 92 ������and a time machine 318 ������tractable tasks 198, 210, 214, 220, 357 ������universality 97, 195�6, 197, 208, 221, 238�9, 252, 350 ������as a world�view 346 ������and virtual reality 122, 123 {373} computation theory 98, 123�39, 194�221, 249�50, 336�7, 344�6 ������as one of the four main strands of explanation 28, 30�31, 97, 319�20 ������universality in 98 computer science 20 computer simulations 6 ������see also virtual reality computers 11 ������abstract 131�4 ������and the brain 124�5, 238, 335, 337 ������cellular 173 ������computation speed 124, 126, 194, 351, 365 ������home 129, 194, 200 ������mathematicians as 132 ������memory 92, 95, 123, 124, 126, 194, 348, 350, 365 ������omnipotent 355�6 ������programs 92, 118, 119, 125�31, 137, 139, 171, 181, 194, 237, 243, 244, 251, 318, 352, 357 ������quantum 132, 214, 218�21, 238, 250, 251 ������repertoires 132�4, 214 ������special�purpose quantum 209, 214, 218, 220 ������Turing machines 131�2 ������universal 98, 131, 132, 134, 197, 210, 238, 330�31, 348, 353, 3S4 ������universal quantum 128, 210, 213, 214, 215, 220 ������universe as a computer 346 ������viruses 171 Confessions (St Augustine) 258 conjectures 64, 67, 68�9, 71, 141, 142, 323, 332 consciousness 82, 141, 238, 262�3, 327, 331, 337�8 ������'what is consciousness' problem 336�8 continuous/continuum 35, 36, 211, 224 Conway, John Horton 228 Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics 327�8, 329, 335, 342 'Copenhagen school' 327 Copernican revolution 169 Copernicus, Nicolaus 9, 56, 95 corroboration 145�9, 150, 151, 157 cosmic 'rays' 188�9 cosmological models 348 cosmology 24�5, 26, 63, 78, 79, 138, 344, 348, 354, 355 ������omega�point 348�9 ������quantum 330, 335 counter�factual conditionals 275, 285, 288, 310 creationism 80, 315�16, 335 criteria for reality 73�97 criticism 64, 65, 169, 321, 323, 332 ������of conjectures 64, 71 ������and experimental tests 65, 66, 71 ������of the four strands 336 ������inventing new methods of 67 ������levelled at explanations 66 ������rational 64, 65, 70, 351 ������in scientific research 65, 65, 326 ������of theories 64, 66, 67, 68 Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (ed.

problem 337 Life of Johnson (Boswell) 86 light ������bending of 37�40 ������ductility of 38 ������laser 34, 40 ������speed of 44, 99, 105, 107, 125, 160, 348 ������spreading 34, 38 ������white 38�9, 39 ������see also photons logic 20, 161, 168, 229, 231, 248�9 Aristotelian 254 ������law of the excluded middle 232�3 ������limitations of 225 ������and mathematical intuition 231, 232 ������rules of inference see rules of inference symbolic 230 ������logical positivism see positivism logically possible/impossible see under environment; experience master builder 13�15, 358�9 mathematical intuition see under intuition mathematical questions ������computable 132, 133 ������non�computable 132�3 mathematical theorems 146, 227�8, 230, 234, 236, 247 mathematics 20, 199, 221, 228, 236, 256 ������and the behaviour of physical objects 133, 253�5 ������certainty in 224, 226, 230, 233�4, 236, 238, 240 ������creativity as central to 236, 240 ������and explanation 253 ������and nature 73, 74, 76, 94 ������the objective of 253 ������as the study of absolutely necessary truths 253 ������and the theory of computation 98 ������understanding in 10 ������and virtual reality 120, 131 Maxwell, James Clerk 9 medicine, specialization in 16 memes 171, 187, 193, 336, 346, 360 Mercury 56 meta�mathematics see proof theory Milky Way 177 mind 11, 90, 352 ������as a computer program 352, 353 ������and mathematical certainties 236 ������and problem�solving 71, 72, 76 ������and solipsism 58, 70, 80, 82, 83 ������and time travel 310 ������and virtual reality 106, 111�12 ������see also thought morality 359�63, 364, 365�6 ������must be objective 364 motion, laws of 20, 24�7, 213, 337, 338 multiverse 46, 47, 48, 53, 58, 95, 185, 187, 190, 191, 206, 207, 211, 212, {381} 212, 275�80, 277, 281, 283, 287, 305, 330. 335, 338, 339, 366 ������causes and effects in 276, 286 ������and DNA 189, 190, 190 ������as a jigsaw puzzle 285 ������and the omega point 352, 364 ������and parallel spacetimes 289�90 ������and parallel universes 54 ������and philosophical problems 339�40 ������and physically possible processes 105, 135 ������and quantum theory 50 ������reality as a 54, 288 ������and time travel 306, 307, 308, 310, 312, 316, 318 ������and virtual reality 103, 357 mutation 68, 188, 189 The Myth of the Framework (Popper) 323 natural numbers see under numbers natural selection 315, 332, 333 nature laws of 255, 337; see also laws of physics ������and mathematics 73, 74, 76, 94 ������as physics 169 ������quantum computation harnesses 195, 221 Neptune, discovery of 56 Newton, Isaac 2, 3, 17, 56, 85, 93, 266�7, 269, 324, 337, 344 ������concept of time 266�7 niches 68, 121, 172, 174, 175, 179, 181, 182, 187, 188, 193, 315, 316, 333 nuclear physics 18, 23, 182 numbers ������arabic notation 9 ������and the diagonal argument 126 ������factorization 104, 199�200, 215�16 ������imaginary 227�8 ������infinite 228 ������multiplying large 198�9 ������natural 223, 226, 228, 231, 232�3, 242 ������negative 227 ������prime 133, 199, 215, 223, 224, 228 real 227�8 ������Roman numerals 9�12 numerology 63 observation(s) 76, 224 ������and arguments 69, 147 ������and the Copenhagen interpretation 327�8 ������and explanation 75, 224, 225 ������extrapolating 59, 60�61, 71 ������and inductivism 59, 60, 61, 69, 149 ������and justification of theories 59, 60, 156 ������and prediction 60, 61, 75, 141 ������and reality 74 ������and theories 59�62, 69, 71, 77, 141, 224, 225 ������unexpected 62�3 ������virtual reality and 225 Occam's razor 78, 96, 137, 160 omega�point theory 347�59, 364, 365 'On the Infinite' (Hilbert) 250 On the Plurality of Worlds (Lewis) 340 The Open Society and its Enemies (Popper) 344 oracle ������and experimentation 4, 5 ������and instrumentalists 4, 6 ������physical world as an 5�6 ������and theories 4, 5, 6 organism ������DNA 173, 175 ������life�style 175 ������niche of 172 ������as part of the environment of replicator's 175, 176 ������rendered 178�9 ������not a replicator 175�6 origin of species 315, 316, 332, 333 {382} Page, Don 278 paper 120, 131, 246, 252�3 paradigm 321, 330, 331, 334, 342 ������succession 323�4, 327, 332 parallel axiom 247 parallel universes 53, 57, 60, 89, 95, 136�7, 207, 221, 305, 308, 353 ������and Bohm's theory 93�4 ������as distinguished only by what happens in them 307 ������and Dr Johnson's criterion 88�9 ������existence revealed 32�3 ������and genes 187�191, 190 ������and interference 59, 168, 213 ������and the multiverse 46, 54 ������quantum computation and 195, 220 ������quantum theory of 51 ������and randomness 202�4 ������rendering of 300, 357 ������stacked 211 ������and the weather 202 ������and time 278, 305 particle accelerators 5, 19 particle physics 8 past, changing the 309�10 Penrose, Roger 132, 236�40, 255, 331 penumbras 36, 37, 37, 38, 39, 42 perception 57; ������see also sensations perfect accuracy see under accuracy photons 4, 35, 35, 38, 41�4, 53, 88, 89, 188, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 218, 219; ������see also light physically possible/impossible see under environment; virtual�reality generators physics ������classical, and chaos theory 201 ������and complexity 21, 197 ������geometry incorporated into 17�18 ������laws of see laws of physics ������nature as 169 ������Newtonian 169, 268, 270 ������split into specializations 8 ������subatomic 27, 169 ������swallows up hitherto unrelated ������subjects 344 ������and the theory of everything 21 ������and the Turing principle see under Turing principle The Physics of Immortality (Tipler) 347 Planck time 284, 312 planetarium 77�8, 91, 92, 95, 136 planets 68, 107 ������motions of the 1�4, 12, 13, 56, 60, 66, 78�9, 85�9, 92, 201, 240, 337 ������and stars 55 ������wandering 60, 62, 63 Plato 226, 227, 231, 236, 240�43, 245, 255 Popper, Karl/Popperian v, 76, 141�9, 151, 154, 157, 158, 165�6, 322, 323, 331, 334, 345, 365 ������and artificial intelligence 331 ������and corroboration 145 ������critics of Popperian epistemology 340 ������and explanations leading to new problems 139 ������and the future growth of knowledge 359 ������on history 344 ������and induction 144, 146, 156 ������and justification 156 ������and the theory of evolution 341 ������theory of scientific knowledge 62, 68, 315, 335�6 positivism 6, 29�30, 48, 75, 84, 341 ������and the Copenhagen interpretation 328 Post, Emil 131, 133, 252 pragmatic instrumentalism 48, 329 prediction 48, 85 ������in astronomy 2, 3, 4, 56�7, 73, 185 ������by an oracle 4, 5 ������conflicting 65 ������correct 65, 145�9 ������and explanation 5, 6, 8, 11, 62, 64�5, 66, 76 {383} ������false 7, 65, 142 ������and inductivism 69 ������and instrumentalism 3, 21 ������justification of 146, 147, 161�2, 164 ������and laws of motion 20, 25, 26 ������limitations in classical physics 201 ������limitations in quantum physics 202�3 ������in the multiverse 283 ������and Newtonian physics 270 ������and observation 60, 61, 75, 141 ������as part of the characteristic method of science 6 ������and positivism 6 ������in pre�quantum physics 270 ������in principle 2 ������probabilistic 280, 281; ������see also probability ������and quantum theory 25, 44, 50�51, 203�4, 280, 329 ������theories and 2, 3, 4, 6�7, 30, 60, 117, 118, 147, 156, 162 ������and the theory of everything 18�19, 22, 235 ������and the theory of evolution 362 predictive emergence 362 prime pair 133 Principia (Newton) 266�7 principle of increasing entropy see thermodynamics, second law of 'principle of induction' see under induction prions 171 probability 18, 22, 59, 116, 203�4, 280�81 307 problem 62, 64, 65, 70, 141 ������backtracking 67 ������emergent properties of 68 ������of induction see induction ������new 62�3, 64, 65 ������scientific 70 ������variants of 67 problem�situation 148, 153, 154, 156, 157, 161, 315 problem�solving 55�72, 80, 323 ������by the brain 238 ������and reality 76 ������science and 62, 65, 70, 76 proof 131, 224, 227, 244, 256 ������and certainty 224, 225, 227, 256 ������and experiment 224 ������and explanation 236 ������methods of 227, 229, 230, 233, 239, 246, 256�7 ������new types of 136 ������number of steps 249�50, 251 ������as a physical process 246, 248 ������quantum 251�2 ������role in mathematics 224 ������and syllogisms 229�30 ������traditional definition 245 ������as a type of computation 246 proof theory 229�30, 231, 234, 248, 344 proteins 171 Ptolemaic system 9; ������see also geocentric theory public�key cryptography 215, 217, 219 punctuated equilibrium theory 334, 335 Pythagoras 226, 238 quantization 35�6, 54, 127 quantum computation see under computation quantum computers see under computers quantum cosmology 330, 335 quantum cryptography 218 quantum factorization engine 215�16, 217, 220 quantum gates 214 quantum mechanics ������and the 'butterfly effect' 202, 203 ������Copenhagen interpretation 327�8, 329, 335, 342 ������interpretation of 335 ������intractability in 203 ������and parallel universes 319 {384} ������and 'snapshots' 317 ������and tossing a coin 282 ������unpredictability in 203 ������see also quantum theory quantum optics 32 quantum physics 32�54, 194�221, 258�88, 289�320, 321�43, 344�66 ������links with epistemology and computation 344 quantum theory 8, 23�4, 32�54, 53, 157, 211, 228, 313, 328�9, 338 ������as about the 'interaction of the real with the possible' 48 ������of computation see under computation ������determinism of 281 ������and discrete steps 250 ������and the general theory of relativity 134, 177 ������and a multiverse 50, 328 ������and the nature of time 27, 278 ������as one of the four main strands of explanation 24, 28, 30�31 ������and parallel universes 51 ������and prediction 25, 44, 50�51, 203�4, 280, 329 ������and quantization 35�6, 54, 127 ������and reality 24, 50 ������and the theory of evolution 190�93 quantum theory of gravity 24, 277 quantum/quanta 35 quasars 12�13 Quirk, Randolph 258, 260 randomness ������explaining unpredictable events 8, 22 ������and free will 338 ������multiverse view of 203, 279�82 ������random DNA sequences 173, 188 ������see also probability rationality 80, 86, 169, 240, 328, 329, 331, 335 ������incompatible with faith 169 ������principles of 156, 161, 162, 163, 331 ������see also reason realism 74, 85, 96, 329 ������and common sense 74, 83, 84 ������solipsism disguised as 84, 97 reality ������as bigger than it seems 45, 136 ������and Bohm's theory 93�4 ������comprehensible 138, 140 ������criteria for 73�97 ������Dr Johnson's criterion for 86�93, 97, 101 ������existence of entities in 222 ������Galileo's conception of 94 ������and 'kicking back' 86�90, 92, 97, 101, 223 ������and multiverse 46 ������of natural numbers 222 ������not affected by 'the possible' 48 ������objective 240 ������physical 24, 74, 168, 186, 255, 267, 272, 275, 291, 297, 298, 327 ������Platonic 226�7 ������quantum theory and 24, 50 ������as quantum�mechanical 201 ������reason and 81 ������and reductionism 25 ������and scientific reasoning 97 ������self�similarity of 95, 98, 134, 140 ������and solipsism 58, 83 ������and substantial computation 92 ������understanding the whole of 117 ������a unified conception of 29, 30 ������virtual see virtual reality reason ix, 72, 74, 76, 81, 227; ������see also rationality red giant 183, 184, 186, 353 reductionism 19, 21, 27, 30, 84, 169, 176, 345 ������and explanation 21, 24 ������extended sense of 347 ������and holism 21 ������and mathematics 235 {385} ������and reality 25 ������science as reductionist 19 ������and the theory of everything 20 ������world�view 23, 343 refutation 65, 150, 332 ������experimental 65 ������and the growth of knowledge 68 ������of inductivism see induction ������of intuitionism 231�3 ������and Hilbert's tenth problem 234 ������of obsolete theories 335 ������of solipsism 85 ������of theories see under theories relativity, general theory of 2�3, 12, 56, 89, 145, 157, 159, 228, 238, 239, 247, 268, 312, 344 ������Einstein's equations 311�12 ������incorporates geometry into physics 17�18, 344 ������'unphysical' solutions 311 ������������see also gravity relativity, special theory of 290 rendering see virtual reality repertoire ������of abstract computers 132, 133�4 ������of image generator 105�11 ������and internal experiences 104 ������of master builder 14 ������of Turing machines 132 ������of universal quantum computer 210 ������of virtual�reality generators see under virtual�reality generators replicator(s) 170�71, 188, 192, 334 ������adaptation to its niche 174, 177, 180 ������contributes causally to its own copying 172, 173, 274 ������highly adapted 174, 340 ������variants 174, 274 ������see also genes; memes resurrection of the dead 357�8 retrodiction 270, 282 Reviews of Modern Physics 328 Rivest, Ronald 215 RNA 171, 192 Roman numerals 9�10, 11, 12 rotation 224 roulette wheel 115�16 RSA cryptosystem 215, 216 rules of inference 163, 229, 230, 233, 234, 236, 237, 245, 250, 251, 256 rules of thumb 14�15, 16, 253 Russell, Bertrand 60, 61, 230, 254 Schwarzschild, Karl 311 Sciama, Dennis 335 science ������'normal' 322 ������problem�solving in 62, 65, 70, 76 ������purpose of 4, 7, 71, 117 ������and reductionism 19, 20, 21 ������'revolutionary' 322, 334 ������and virtual reality 117�18, 135 scientific discovery compared with biological evolution 68, 71 ������the course of 65, 67 ������and experimental tests 65 ������and an unexpected observation 62�3 scientific methodology 6�7, 65, 70, 73, 143, 144, 147, 149, 332, 340 ������in practice 325�7 scientific reasoning and inaccurate experiences 136 ������reliability of 94, 97 ������and virtual reality 101 self�similarity 95�8, 96, 134, 135, 140, 47 The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) 176, 334 'selfish gene' theory 334, 340 sensations 52, 87, 92, 105�10, 254 sensory isolation 104�5, 125, 128 sets 224, 228, 230, 231, 254 shadow particles/photons 43�9, 52, 53, 88, 93 shadows 32�55, 58, 59, 168, 206, 207 ������penumbras of 36�7, 37 {386} ������umbras of 36, 37 Shakespeare, William 258, 259, 314, 315 Shamir, Adi 215 Shor, Peter 215 Shor's algorithm 215, 216�17 snapshots see under time sociobiology 360 solipsism 58, 70, 80, 81, 137, 287 ������and the angel theory of planetary motion 88 ������central thesis of 81 ������defence of 81�2 ������and explanation 97, 142, 233 ������as indefensible 82, 84 ������and intuitionism 231, 232, 233 ������joke 81 ������as realism disguised 83�4, 97 ������refutation of 97, 102 ������variants 85 sound reproduction 109�10 space ������curved 3, 4, 12, 23, 56, 57, 86, 89 ������three�dimensional 267�8 ������and time 268 spaceflight simulators 107 spacetime 267, 268, 268, 288, 355 ������as the 'block universe' 268, 270 ������curvature 159, 161 ������and 'Faraday's death in 1830' premise 274�6 ������as a four�dimensional entity 268 ������as incompatible with the existence of cause and effect 274 ������omega�point 349�50 ������parallel spacetimes 289�90 ������shuffled 271, 272, 282�3 ������as unchanging 338 spacetime physics 269, 270, 274, 275, 279, 283, 285, 288, 309, 338 special�purpose quantum computer ������see under computers specialization 8�9 ������in medicine 16 spectral types 185 stellar evolution 182�3, 185 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) 321 subatomic particles 18, 20, 21, 23, 96 Sun ������control of 183�4, 353 ������future development 183, 184, 186, 353 ������heliocentric theory 9, 56, 73, 96, 169 ������and the 'Inquisition's theory' 77 ������and the solar system 177 source of energy 182 superconductivity 214 superfluidity 214 supermarkets, virtual�reality 101 superstring theory 23 survival of the fittest 333 syllogisms 229, 230 symbolic logic see under logic symbols ������and abstract entities 245, 246 ������as physical objects 127, 241 tangible particles 43�7, 48, 49, 52, 53, 53 theories 9 ������amended 64, 68 ������becoming deeper 13, 14�15, 16, 17, 30 ������becoming fewer 13, 14�15, 17 ������becoming more general 13, 14�15, 16, 17, 30 ������as conjectural 64, 69, 71, 141 ������corroboration of see corroboration ������demotion of 11, 13 ������and evolution 68 ������explanation and 2�3, 4, 7, 60, 66, 71, 76, 80�81, 117, 118, 157, 332 ������genes as 315 ������as imperfect 17 ������implicit 9 ������inborn 121, 136 ������justification of see justification {387} ������languages as 153 ������logical relationships between 28 ������and observations 59�62, 69, 71, 77, 141, 156, 224, 225 ������and an oracle 4, 5, 6 ������postulating anomalies 155, 156 ������and predictions 2, 3, 4, 6�7, 30, 60, 117, 118, 147, 156, 162 ������as programs 121 ������proposed new 64 ������refutation of 142, 147�51, 321, 335 ������rejection of 7, 64�7, 147, 152, 160 ������rival 65, 148 ������selection of 68, 69, 71, 142 ������superseding old ones 9, 17�18, 30, ������unconscious 121 ������unifying two old ones 9 ������variants of 68, 150 Theory of Everything 17, 19 ������as the first fully universal theory 18 ������and the four main strands of ������explanation 28�9, 30�31, 345 theory of everything 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 169 ������and explanation 19 ������and the initial state 19, 24 ������particle physicists and 18, 30 ������and prediction 18�19, 22, 235 ������and a quantum theory of gravity 24 thermodynamics 8, 164 ������second law of (principle of increasing entropy) 286, 345 thought(s) ������as an emergent phenomenon 21 ������and the fabric of reality 3 ������and machines 238 ������and solipsism 83 ������virtual�reality renderings 352 ������and a wider universe 138 ������see also mind time ������breakdown of sequence of 283�5 ������common�sense concept of, see under common sense ������as a continuum 267 ������dilation 290�91 ������'flow' of 141, 258, 261, 263�6, 269, 270, 284, 287, 287, 288, 309 ������as a fourth dimension 267 ������mystery of 258, 260 ������Newtonian concept 266�7 ������and physical intuition 253�4 ������the present moment ('now') 258�65, ZS9, 260, 262 ������quantum concept of 257, 278, 287, ������305, 310, 319 ������and quantum theory 27 ������'snapshots' 259, 260, 260, 261, 263, 265, 267, 270�72, 276�86, 288, 290, 291, 300, 304, 305, 309, 310, 316, 318 ������and virtual�reality generators 125 ������see also clocks and calendars; spacetime time machines 289, 292�301, 299, 304�8, 310, 313, 314�15, 317, 318, 319 'time stamps' 272, 278, 283 time travel 288, 289�320, 319, 320, 344 ������attempt to enact a paradox 305�6, 306, 311, 317 ������collision avoidance 299�300, 314 ������and epistemology 315 ������and evolution 315 ������future�directed 290, 291, 312, 319 ������grandfather paradox 293, 319 ������and inter�universe travel 310 ������knowledge paradox 314, 315, 316, 319 ������multiple copies of the time traveller 299, 299, 301�8, 311 ������paradoxes of 293, 294, 295, 307, 312, 314, 315, 319 ������past�directed 290, 291, 293, 295�6, 298, 310, 312�13, 319 ������physically possible 311 {388} ������present�directed 291 ������spacetime path 296 Tipler, Frank 185�6, 347, 349, 351, 353�8, 364�5, 366 Toffoli, Tomasso 346 tractability 196, 198, 220 Turing, Alan v, 133, 325 ������and Cantgotu experiments 128 ������and classical mechanics 210, 211 ������modern theory of computation 126, 131, 132, 252, 335, 336, 339, 366 ������see also Church�Turing conjecture Turing machines 131�2, 140, 194, 195, 210, 213, 218, 250, 252 ������universal 132, 134, 140 Turing principle 132, 134, 140, 193, 197, 193, 340, 341 ������as the best theory of the foundations of computation 350 ������as a fundamental principle of nature 354 ������and the laws of physics 136, 181, 197 ������links physics and the theory of computation 340 ������and the omega�point theory 348, 351 ������Penrose and 132, 237, 240 ������and the physical embodiment of knowledge 181, 182 ������and self�similarity 347 ������strong form 134, 135, 136 ������universal computer/computation 132, 221, 330�31, 353, 354 ������universal virtual�reality generator 134, 135, 163�4, 292, 303, 348 ������virtual reality first realized in nature 181�2, 193 ������see also Church�Turing conjecture umbra 36, 37, 38, 39 unconsciousness 104 understanding 342 ������everything that is understood 1, 8, 9, 10, 13, 16�17, 30 ������explanations and 11, 224 ������extended into new areas 15 ������and the four main strands of explanation 28 ������implicit 11�12 ������increased understanding with less learning 9 ������in mathematics 10, 234 ������as the motivation for science 4 ������and observation 224 ������of quantum interference 168 ������and unifications 18 ������and world�view shifts 18 universal auditory sensation generator 110 universal image generators 109�11, 121, 129, 134 universal quantum computer see under computers universal quantum simulator 210 universal Turing machine 132, 134, 139 universal virtual�reality generator 130�31, 134, 135, 137, 139 universality ������computational 97, 195�6, 197, 108, 221, 239, 252, 350 ������and explanations 29 ������and intractability 208 ������quantum computers and 219 ������of the universal Turing machine 134 ������and virtual�reality generators see under virtual�reality generators universe 46, 169 ������block see spacetime ������colonizing 353 ������as a computer 346 ������expanding 311, 348 ������experience of a single 136, 141 ������finite in space and time 348�9 ������initial state 25, 26, 27 ������life affecting the structure of 186 ������and reality 45, 52, 54, 74 ������recollapse of 162, 355 {389} ������������see also multiverse; parallel universes unpredictability 203, 208, 220; ������see also probability utilitarianism 361, 362, 363 variation and selection 68, 182, 188, 331 Venus, phases of 77 video games, virtual�reality 100, 103, 127�8, 137 virtual reality 98�122, 255 ������based on the wrong laws 136 ������and future�directed time travel 290 ������as interactive 113, 114 ������and living processes 175 ������and mathematical truths 255, 257 ������and science 117�18, 135 ������and observation 225 ������and proof 224 ������and rendering logically possible environments 129 ������theory of 243 ������ultimate limits of 105, 196 virtual�reality generators 99, 102, 103, 104, 111, 116, 117, 225, 297�8, 300�304, 306�8 ������and the brain 121, 124�5, 126 ������and Cantgotu environments 128 ������and externally elapsed time 125 ������and the laws of physics 243�4 ������and past�directed time travel 291, 293 ������physically possible 126, 133, 135 ������principal components 112 ������rendering 118�19, 179, 243, 244, 245, 291, 295, 297, 298�9, 307 ������repertoire 105, 122, 124, 126, 128�9, 130, 134, 135, 140, 164 ������and time machines 318 ������and the Turing principle 134, 135, 163�4, 181 ������ultimate 123�6, 129 ������universal 124, 130�31, 134, 135, 137, 139, 163�4, 197, 291, 191, 303, 310, 340, 348 ������'working memory' 123�4 war 22, 184, 185 Watkins, John 144 weather 6, 63, 98, 200�201, 202 weightlessness 106, 107, 108 Weinberg, Steven ������pointlessness of the universe 346 ������unimportance of explanation 3�4 Wheeler, John Archibald 328 'Why Both Popper and Watkins Fail to Solve the Problem of Induction' (Worrall) 143�4 Wickramasinghe, Chandra 333 Wooters, William 278 world�view 62, 75, 83, 97, 159, 161, 169, 318�19, 321, 331, 335 ������Darwin and 337 ������ever greater changes in 57 ������and misleading phenomena 103 ������and moral values 359, 361 ������and the multiverse 48 ������Newtonian 56, 58 ������Penrose and 239, 240 ������positivism rejected as a 84 ������and problem�solving 68 ������reductionist 23, 345, 347 ������single�universe 93, 217 ������and a Theory of Everything 18 ������unified 366 Worrall, John 143�4 Zeno of Elea 249 {390} * * * * In Freedom and Rationality: Essays in Honour of John Watkins


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

(Ehrlich later hedged, acknowledging that there might be some educational value in restoring the butterfly.)[2] Yet the proposed revival of Xerces is perhaps the clearest way to illustrate Brand’s pragmatic approach and his optimistic philosophy, a literal evocation of the “butterfly effect” that suggests the possibility that the smallest change in the environment can have an immense and nondeterministic effect. It evokes Brand’s access-to-tools philosophy as well as Engelbart’s augmentation philosophy. It also stakes out the boundaries of Brand’s techno-optimist philosophy. The idea of the butterfly effect was at the heart of Ray Bradbury’s 1952 science fiction short story “The Sound of Thunder,” in which a hunter uses a time travel machine to journey back in history to shoot a Tyrannosaurus rex, only to accidentally crush a butterfly by stepping off the path.

Spencer, 216 Brown, Jerry, 98, 225–27, 230, 231, 348 Brussell, Mae, 215 Burning Man festival, 109, 328 Burrows, George Lord (great-grandfather), 8–9 Burrows, Lorenzo (great-great-grandfather), 7 Butler, Katy, 247–48 butterfly effect, 361 C Caffe Trieste, 48, 74 California, University of, at Berkeley, 25, 135, 302 California Museum of Science and Industry, 91 California Water Atlas, 227 Callahan, Michael, 94, 106–7, 137 Calthorpe, Peter, 129, 246, 256, 302, 305, 306, 307, 318, 341 Cannery Row (Steinbeck), 18, 46, 243 Cape Breton Island, Canada, Jennings and SB’s home on, 199–200, 207–9, 218, 234–35 Capra, Frank, 28 Capra, Fritjof, 295, 297 Carlston, Doug, 271, 325, 328–29 Carroll, Jon, 357 Cassady, Neal, 69, 126, 131–32, 143 Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 45–46, 208 Chappell, Walter, 116, 119 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, 282 Chicago 8, trial of, 177, 188 Chippewas, 7 choice, freedom of, 42–43 Church, George, 360 Churchill, Winston, 291 CIA, 202, 298 City Lights Books, 37, 50, 74 Clear Creek, 205 climate change, 338–39 SB and, 4, 338, 339, 342, 347, 348–50, 357, 361 Schwartz and, 338–40, 342 Clock Library, 314, 325, 326, 327–28, 329, 362 Coate, John, 309 coevolution, 46, 217, 219, 222, 223, 232 CoEvolution Quarterly, 6, 85, 175, 208, 221–22, 227, 229, 230, 236, 240–41, 251, 254, 255–56, 257, 289 Black Panther–edited issues of, 229 Butler’s article on Baker scandal in, 247–48 demise of, 261 Gaia hypothesis story in, 230, 349 Kelly’s cover article in, 254 Kleiner’s cyberspace article in, 240 as money-losing venture, 233, 240 O’Neill’s space colonies story in, 231–32 provocative viewpoint of, 228–29 SB’s idiosyncratic editorial style at, 229, 249 SB’s separation from, 271 Schweickart’s “No Frames, No Boundaries” reprinted in, 225 Co-Existence Bagel Shop, 37, 48, 74 Collyns, Napier, 277, 295 Commoner, Barry, 206 commune movement, 139–40, 154, 177 communications technology, 133, 241, 282, 290, 298 Community Memory, 265 complex systems, learning by, 274, 277, 279–80, 284, 289 computer conferencing, 151, 240, 251–52, 263, 264, 265, 266 computer networks, see cyberspace; internet computers, computing: counterculture and, 185–86 Engelbart’s “bootstrapping” vision of, 151, 153 hobbyists in, 147, 158, 196, 198, 213, 230, 266–67 personal, see personal computers predicted exponential increase in powers of, 152–53 SB’s growing interest in, 145–46, 168, 266, 280 conservationism, of SB, 4, 340 Contact Is the Only Love (Stern), 93, 136 counterculture, 2, 10, 71, 75, 143, 146, 176, 177–78, 202, 216, 228 computing community and, 185–86 demise of, 181, 241 political-psychedelic divide in, 145, 152 SB’s negative reassessment of, 297 Trips Festival as catalyst for, 127–28, 130 Whole Earth Catalog in, 173–74 Counterculture Green (Kirk), 135 Coyote, Peter, 127, 225, 226, 287–88, 297, 358, 361 Creative Initiative Foundation, 41 Creative Philanthropy seminar, SB’s organizing of, 250 creativity, LSD and, 72, 76–77 Crooks family, 65–66 Crosby, David, 189–90 Crumb, R., 215, 228 Curwen, Darcy, 22, 23 cybernetics, 2, 4, 169, 208, 213, 216–17, 226, 273 Cybernetics (Wiener), 169, 226 cyberspace, 54, 84, 212, 240, 254–55, 258, 261, 279, 298–99 anonymity and pseudonymity in, 266 dangers of, 293, 315 dystopian aspects of, 308, 310–11 gold rush mentality and, 293, 323 impact of, 295–96 SB and, 4, 251–52, 282, 293 see also internet D Dalton, Richard, 261 Daumal, René, 186 Deadheads, 265–66 Defense Department, US, 315, 338 de Geus, Arie, 274, 285, 289 Delattre, Pierre, 47, 74 deserts, SB’s attraction to, 108–10, 114 Desert Solitaire (Abbey), 181 desktop publishing, 164–65 Detroit Free Press, 10, 172–73 Dick Cavett Show, SB’s appearance on, 192 Diehl, Digby, 200 Diggers, 206 Direct Medical Knowledge, 326, 333, 342 DiRuscio, Jim, 324–25 Divine Right’s Trip (Norman), 193, 223 DNA Direct, 343 Dome Cookbook (Baer), 162, 180 Doors of Perception, The (Huxley), 28 dot-com bubble, 296, 326, 333–34, 348 Doubleday, 253, 256, 257 Drop City (commune), 154, 162 “Drugs and the Arts” panel (SUNY Buffalo), 177 Duffy, Frank, 319 Durkee, Aurora, 180 Durkee, Barbara and Stephen, 61, 105, 119–20, 137, 139, 162, 177, 179, 180, 186, 229 Garnerville studio of, 60, 66, 69, 105, 106–7 SB’s friendship with, 51–52, 59–60, 66, 67, 133 in USCO, 106–7 Dvorak, John, 259, 260 Dymax, 147–48 Dynabook, 212 Dyson, Esther, 315, 325 E Eames, Charles, 44–45, 96, 113 Earth, viewed from space: SB’s campaign for photograph of, 134–35, 164 SB’s revelatory vision of, 1, 6, 362 Earth Day (1970), 182, 190, 364 Edson, Joanna, 75–76 Edson, John, 14, 18–20, 38–39, 75 education: intersection of technology and, 144, 145 see also alternative education movement; learning, act of Education Automation (Fuller), 169 Education Innovations Faire, 149 Ehrlich, Paul, 46, 177, 341, 360–61, 364 SB as influenced by, 28, 45, 47, 187, 188, 206, 222–23 EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System), 240, 251–52, 264, 266 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (Wolfe), 5, 88, 111, 121, 125, 170, 181 “Electric Kool-Aid Management Consultant, The” (Fortune profile of SB), 297 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 325 endangered species, 2, 360–61 Engelbart, Douglas, 83, 138, 146, 151–53, 158, 186–87, 230, 292, 361 “Mother of All Demos” by, 171–72 oNLine System of, 151, 156, 197, 212 SB influenced by, 150, 153, 185, 364 English, Bill, 160, 171, 185, 203, 211 English, Roberta, 160 Eno, Brian, 305, 306, 314, 319, 320, 325, 327, 336, 342, 353, 354 “Environmental Heresies” (Brand), 341–42 environmental movement, 2, 71, 159, 204 activist approach to, 181–82, 187, 188, 201–2, 297, 347 conservation vs. preservation in, 340 SB’s break with, 246, 336, 341, 347 SB’s role in, 4, 9–10, 180, 181–82, 201, 202, 204–7, 284, 347 Esalen Institute, 71–72, 84, 138, 176, 185 Esquire, 88, 146, 183, 247, 250 Essential Whole Earth Catalog, 286 Evans, Dave, 146, 156, 180, 185–87, 212 Exploratorium, 194–98 extinct species, revival of, 359–60 F Fadiman, Jeff, 38, 44, 59, 62–63, 64 Fadiman, Jim, 72–73, 77–78, 80, 84, 89, 97, 98, 101 Fall Joint Computer Conference (San Francisco; 1968), 171–72 Fano, Robert, 46, 273 Fariña, Mimi, 141, 237 Farm (commune), 257 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 50, 71 Field, Eric, 44, 53 Fillmore Auditorium (San Francisco), 125–26, 128, 130 filter bubbles, 279, 308 Fluegelman, Andrew, 220, 221–22, 269 Foer, Franklin, 5 Foreign Policy, 356 Fort Benning, SB at, 53–58 Fort Dix, SB at, 58–63, 64, 65–68 Fortune, 297, 339 “Four Changes” (Snyder), 187 Francis, Sharon, 105, 112 Frank, Delbert, 86–87 Frank, Robert, 179, 188, 199–200, 218 Fraunhofer, Joseph Ritter von, 108 Free Speech Movement, 135, 175 From Bauhaus to Our House (Wolfe), 304–5 “Fruits of a Scholar’s Paradise” (Brand; unpublished), 45–46, 208 Fukushima nuclear disaster, 355–58 Fuller, Buckminster, 134, 147, 162, 169, 175, 176, 217 SB influenced by, 132, 138, 146, 150, 168–69, 222, 243–44, 363–64 Fulton, Katherine, 318 futurists, 262, 273 SB as, 258–59, 280, 323 G Gaia hypothesis, 230, 349 games, SB’s interest in, 84, 120, 129–30, 149, 210, 211, 217, 219–21, 236–37 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 53 Garcia, Jerry, 128, 158 Garnerville, N.Y., Durkee/USCO studio at, 60, 66, 69, 105, 106–7, 136, 154 Gaskin, Stephen, 257 Gause, Gregory, 46 GBN, see Global Business Network genetic engineering, 341, 344, 360–61 geodesic domes, 176, 217 Georgia-Pacific, 9, 29 Gerbode Valley, Calif., 219–21, 236–37 Getty Museum, 329 Gibbons, Euell, 138 Gibson, William, 262, 294, 315 Gilman, Nils, 297–98 Gilmore, John, 325, 352 Ginsberg, Allen, 33–34, 50, 69, 77, 94, 177, 237 Global Business Network (GBN), 291, 295–300, 311, 313, 335, 340 Brand and Schwartz as co-founders of, 291–92 climate change scenario of, 338–39 SB consulting position at, 296, 298, 305, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 343, 354 globalization, 295–96, 346 global warming, see climate change GMO foods, 2, 344, 347, 357 Godwin, Mike, 308 Golden Gate National Recreation Area, 237, 360 Gone (Kirkland), 359 Gottlieb, Lou, 140 government, SB’s evolving view of, 166, 227, 348 Graham, Bill, 124, 125, 128, 130–31, 143 Grand Canyon, SB’s visit to, 19–20 Grateful Dead, 24, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 141, 158, 160, 189, 265–66 Great Basin National Park, 329–30 “Great Bus Race, The,” SB at, 181 Gregorian, Vartan, 27 Griffin, Susan, 295, 297 Griffith, Saul, 349–50 Gross, Cathleen, 286, 289 Grossman, Henry, 63 H hackers, hacker culture, 25, 84, 147–48, 150, 261, 267, 268–69, 273, 293, 294 SB’s Rolling Stone article on, 46, 211–13, 217, 250 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Levy), 266–67, 268, 270 Hackers Conference, 266–70, 326 Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco neighborhood), 74, 75, 128 Halpern, Sue, 241–42 Harman, Willis, 41, 42, 72, 73, 77, 273 Harner, Michael, 101, 118, 129 Harper’s Magazine, 46, 213, 228 SB’s Bateson profile in, 216–17 Whole Earth Epilog proposal of, 218, 219, 222 Harris, David, 149, 162, 299 Harvey, Brian, 268–69 Hawken, Paul, 247–48, 250, 281, 286, 290, 299, 332, 333, 334 Hayden Planetarium, 91, 92, 105 Hayes, Denis, 351 Healy, Mary Jean, 205, 206, 207 Heard, Gerald, 41–42, 84 Hells Angels, 120 Herbert, Anne, 230–31, 241, 255 Hershey, Hal, 183 Hertsgaard, Mark, 357 Hertzfeld, Andy, 267 Hewlett, William, 156 Hewlett-Packard, 147 Hickel, Walter, 206 Higgins Lake, Mich., Brand family camp at, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 21, 30, 209, 289–90, 326, 327 Hillis, Danny, 289, 301, 305, 315, 336 Long Now Clock and, 313–14, 316–17, 325–26, 327, 328, 329, 330, 333, 362, 363 Thinking Machines founded by, 279–80, 288 Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (Smith), 118 Hoagland, Edward, 201 Hoffer, Eric, 32 Hoffman, Abbie, 177–78, 214, 299 Hog Farm commune, 159, 181, 186, 188, 202, 205, 206, 220 Homebrew Computer Club, 147, 158, 198, 230, 266–67 Homo Ludens (Huizinga), 220 Hopcroft, David, 275 Hopi Indians, 100, 139, 205 Horvitz, Robert, 6 House Committee on Education and Labor, SB at hearing of, 190–91 Household Earth, see Life Forum How Buildings Learn (SB’s UC Berkeley seminar), 302 How Buildings Learn (BBC documentary), 320 How Buildings Learn (Brand), 291, 300–301, 304–7, 310, 312, 317–19, 323, 324, 331 How to Be Rich Well (SB book proposal), 344–46 Hubbard, Al, 42, 77, 273 Huerfano Valley, Colo., 139–40 Huizinga, Johan, 220 human potential movement, 71, 73, 84 humans: freedom of choice of, 42–43 as morally responsible for care of natural world, 42, 347, 349, 360, 361 SB’s speculations about fate of, 38–39 Human Use of Human Beings, The (Wiener), 160 Hunger Show (Life-Raft Earth), 187–88, 189, 203, 263 Huxley, Aldous, 28, 33, 41, 72, 144, 226 hypertext, concept of, 172, 230, 292, 293 I IBM, 91, 92, 96, 108, 211 I Ching, 89–90, 117, 153, 197, 253 Idaho, University of, 21 identity, fake, cyberspace and, 266 II Cybernetic Frontiers (Brand), 46, 213, 217, 221 Iktomi (Ivan Drift), 96–97 Illich, Ivan, 196 Independent, 353 information, personalization of, 279 information sharing, 180 information technology, 299–300, 315 information theory, 273 “Information wants to be free,” 270, 299, 301 information warfare, 315 In Our Time (Hemingway), 11 Institute for International Relations (IIR), 27, 34, 35, 37 Institute for the Future, 315 intelligence augmentation (IA), 83, 185, 187 International Federation of Internal Freedom, 89 International Foundation for Advanced Study, LSD experiments at, 42, 72, 73, 76–82, 273 internet, 146, 151, 279, 293, 314, 316, 326 ARPANET as forerunner of, 212 impact of, 295–96, 323 libertarianism and, 5, 348 see also cyberspace Internet Archive, 330, 332 Internet of Things, 279 Interval Research Corporation, 321–23 “Is Environmentalism Dead?”


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

We can make informed guesses about what it is likely to do (its disposition), but we can’t be sure. We can make predictions about the weather, but we cannot control it. Unlike complicated problems, complex problems cannot be solved, only managed. They cannot be controlled, only nudged. This is the domain of the butterfly effect, where a small change can lead to something big, and a big change might barely make a dent. Here expertise can be a disadvantage if it becomes dogma or blinds us to the inherent uncertainty present in our situation. Complex systems are typically made up of a large number of interacting components—people, ants, brain cells, startups—that together exhibit adaptive or emergent behavior without requiring a leader or central control.

adjacent possible, 189, 201 Administration Industrielle et Générale (Fayol), 24 advice process, 70, 72–73 Afshar, Vala, 119 Agile Manifesto, 19, 89, 182 agility, 19, 20, 28–29 Airbnb, 140, 188, 254 al-Qaeda, 128 Amazon, 61, 86, 88, 89, 104–5, 254, 259, 268 Andreessen, Marc, 256 ants, 106 Apple, 86 Ask Me Anything sessions (AMAs), 135–36 authority, 14, 54, 63, 65–74 Automattic, 120 autonomy, 22, 42, 66–67, 74, 194, 258 Bain Capital, 253 Ballpoint, 199–200 banks, 94, 252 Handelsbanken, 13, 94, 227–28 barbell strategy, 86–87, 105–6 Barksdale, Jim, 59 Basecamp, 68, 69, 120 Bell, Alexander Graham, 103 Benchley, Robert, 39 Beyond Budgeting Institute, 97–98 Bezos, Jeff, 61 B Lab, 249, 259 Black Swan, The (Taleb), 86–87 Blank, Steve, 27 Boman, Pär, 227–28 bonuses, 171–72 boundaries, 193, 196–97 Box, George, 49 Boyd, John, 88 Braintrust, 119–20 Brandeis, Louis D., 22–23 Bridgewater Associates, 152, 153 Brin, Sergey, 136 Brookings Institution, 33 Bryant, Adam, 147 budgets, 25, 26, 27, 94–97, 99–100 Buffer, 130–31, 166, 170 bureaucracy, 26–27, 29, 68, 77, 112, 190, 193, 198, 212, 236 Burning Man, 139, 140 butterfly effect, 45 Buurtzorg, 13, 34–36, 38, 79, 105, 144, 218 Catmull, Ed, 120, 191, 192 centralization and decentralization, 77–79 CEOs, 80, 86, 223 change, 14, 28 authority in, 73–74 changing approach to, 187–91 compensation in, 172 continuous participatory, see continuous participatory change information in, 136 innovation in, 108 mastery in, 161 meetings in, 125 membership in, 149 plan for, 185–87 purpose in, 63 resistance to, 233–34 resources in, 100 strategy in, 91, 92 structure in, 81 workflow in, 116 charity: water, 224–25 Chesky, Brian, 254 Christensen, Clayton, 91, 237 Cointelegraph, 251 Colleague Letter of Understanding (CLOU), 55 commitment, 69, 193–96, 212 communities of practice, 160 compensation, 14, 54, 163–73 competence, 42 competition, 144 complexity, 43–45, 68, 79 Complexity Conscious mindset, 13, 36–37, 43–47, 53, 55–57, 190, 195, 199, 244, 258–59, 267 authority and, 74 compensation and, 173 information and, 137 innovation and, 109 mastery and, 162 meetings and, 126 membership and, 150 purpose and, 64 resources and, 101 strategy and, 90, 92 structure and, 82 workflow and, 117 complex systems, 45 adaptive, 129, 187–88 relationships and interactions in, 45, 140 compliance, 27, 46, 66, 122, 258 Cone, Sarah, 253 confidence, 236 consensus, 70 consent, 70–73, 195 continuity, 193, 218–19 continuous participatory change, 191–219 boundaries in, 193, 196–97 commitment in, 193–96 continuity in, 193, 218–19 criticality in, 193, 216–18 learning by doing in, 230–31 looping in, see looping participation in, 228–29 priming in, 193, 197–201, 236 principles for, 228–34 resistance and, 233–34 scaling of, 234–39 sensing and responding in, 231–32 starting by stopping in, 232–33 starting small in, 229–30 constraints, 46 contribution-based pay, 167 control, locus of, 154, 155 Control Inc., 181–83, 185, 196–97, 219, 220, 222 cooperatives, 250 Cornell University, 42 Corner Office, 147 Corning Inc., 103 corporations: new forms of incorporation, 248–51, 252 see also organizations Creativity, Inc.


Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity by Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunne

3D printing, 90 percent rule, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clockwork universe, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, conceptual framework, credit crunch, different worldview, discounted cash flows, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, liberation theology, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, Occupy movement, price stability, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban decay, War on Poverty, working poor

It would be some two centuries later, with the development of computers with massive computational prowess, until equations that would have taken a stadium full of people working for hundreds of years to solve could be solved in a matter of seconds. Relatively precise solutions to the three-body problem were demonstrated. A new field known by various names, including nonlinear dynamics, fractals, chaos, or complexity theory, began to emerge. The concept of the butterfly effect, whereby a flutter of a butterfly wing might cause a massive change in the weather countries away, became common knowledge. In short, it was now understood that everything affects everything else in multifaceted, often unpredictable ways. The critical middle, the stuff in between, as it were, is the infinite complexity of systems that are totally interactive, interconnected, and interdependent.

See Business cycle Boulder Gaian, 113 Brazilian Network of Community Development Banks (CDB), 107 Bridge financing, 121 Bristol Credit Union, 114 Bristol Pound (BP), 114–115 Brixton pound, 75 Brünningsche Notverordnungen, 179 Bubble, 33 Bullion, 27, 113. See also Gold standard Burden of expectations, 19 Bureaucracy, 108, 126–127 Burnout, 194 Business cycle, 51; bank debt amplifying, 52; Terra and, 134 Business-to-business system, 5 Bust. See Business cycle Bus token, 141–143 Butterfly effect, 31 Capitalism, 4, 22. See also Competition Capivari, 109 Carbon-backed currency, 116, 137, 201 Carbon premium exchange (CPX), 116–117 Carebank, 84– 85 Cash crunch, 148–149 Cell phone. See Mobile phone Central bank: bank debt and, 2, 40– 41; Brazil, 107; business cycle and, 52; Swedish, 25–26, 35– 36 CEO turnover, 217 Chance, 31– 32 Chaord, 192 Chaos, 31 Charity, 150 Chicago Plan, 3, 69–71, 231n15, 231n16 Chicago School of Economics, 35 Chiemgauer, 74–75, 87– 89, 88 Child welfare, 80 Civic, 146–148; in Mae Hong Son, 205; nonprofits and, 162 Civil society, 224 Civil unrest, 145–146, 181–182, 192–193 Class, 18; bridging, 83; investing, 193–194; in krama, 190; merchant, 2; middle, 2, 50, 75, 216; underclass, 216; upper, 29, 50.


pages: 315 words: 89,861

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

In fact, many natural processes follow a fractal geometry, such as how a coastline will zig and zag or how arteries and leaves develop in tree-like structures. This science of chaos states that you can’t know exactly what outcome will come from changing small parameters unless you do the work of computing or simulating it. This sensitivity to initial conditions is known as the butterfly effect: When a butterfly flaps its wings, the seemingly small movement has a bigger effect on the world, such as causing a tornado or a hurricane in some other part of the world! A full understanding of fractal and natural chaotic processes wasn’t possible until computers were available to run simulated versions of different fractal equations.

See AGI (Artificial Generalized Intelligence); AI (artificial intelligence); AI (artificial intelligence), history of Aserinsky, Eugene, 189 Ashely-Farrand, 206 Asimov, Isaac, 99 assembly language, 33 Asteroids, 36–37 Atari, 2, 4, 32, 38 atom, 167–68 atomic clocks, 170 augmented images, photorealistic, 63–64 augmented reality (AR), 62–64 Avatar, 58, 64 avatars, 44–45, 46f, 49, 273–74 B bag of karma, 117, 208 basic game loop, 31 BASIC programming language, 33 Beane, Silas, 255 Bhagavad Gita, 204–5 big game world, 30 “big TOE” (Theory of Everything), 156–57 biological materials, 3D printers, 71–72 bitmap, 163–64 black holes, 178–79 Blackthorn, 55 Blade Runner, 9, 77–78, 94 Blade Runner 2049, 65 Bohr, Niels, 13, 122, 124–25, 131, 167 Book of the Dead/Bardo Thol, 192 Boolean logic gates, 258 Born, Max, 131, 167 Bostrom, Nick, 5, 24–26, 105, 114–15, 220–21, 247, 281 Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, 110–11 Bostrom’s Simulation Argument, statistical basis for, 111–14 Brahman, 191 branching, 159 Breakout, 87 A Brief History of Time (Hawking), 10 Brinkley, Dannion, 229–231, 241 Buddha, 1, 183, 249 Buddhism, 14–15 Buddhist Dream Yoga, 191–94 Bushnell, Nolan, 34 butterfly effect, 18–19 Byte, 33 C c (speed of light), 174 C# programming language, 33, 171–73 CAD (computer-aided design), 287 Cameron, James, 64, 96–97 Campbell, Thomas, 156–57, 173–76, 250, 254–55 Capra, Fritjof, 203–4 Carmack, John, 59–60 central processing units (CPUs), 137 CGI (computer-generated imagery) techniques, 63–66 Chalmers, David, 246–47 chaos theory, 18–19 chat-bot, 31, 88, 98, 118 checksums, 256 Chess, 104 chess-playing computer, 86f Choose Your Own Adventure, 83 Christianity, 15–16 Christianity and Judaism, 223–25 Clarke, Arthur C., 96 classical physics, 29, 125, 161, 166, 283–84, 288 classical vs. relativistic physics, 122–24 Cline, Ernest, 56 clock-speed and quantized time, computer simulations, 171–73 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 232, 276 cloud of probabilities, 127 collective dream, 187–88 Colossal Cave Adventure, 27–29, 32, 34 Colossal Cave Adventure, map of, 29f computation, 18–19 computation, and other sciences, 287 computation, evidence of, 256–57, 267–68 overview, 246–47 computation in nature, evidence of, 263–66 computational irreducibility, 18, 79, 266 computer simulations clock-speed and quantized time, 171–73 . see also ancestor simulation; Great Simulation; Simulation Argument; simulation hypothesis; Simulation Point computer-generated imagery (CGI) techniques, 64–66 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing, 1950), 85 conditional rendering, evidence of, 253–55 conflict resolution, 173 conscious players, people as, 114–15 consciousness, 148 as digital informaion, 17–18 as information and computation, 82 consciousness, defined, 115–16 consciousness, digital vs. spiritual, 116–18 consciousness and metaphysical experiments, 249–250 consciousness as information, 104–5 consciousness transference, 198–99 Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation (Beane, Davoudi and Savage), 255 Copenhagen interpretation, 131 Cosmos, 251 CPUs (central processing units), 137 . see also GPUs/CPUs Creative Labs, 62 Crichton, Michael, 71–72 Crick, Francis, 116 Crowther, Will, 27 Curry, Adam, 76 D Dalai Lama, 207 Data, Star Trek: The Next Generation, 95–96, 115 Davoudi, Zohreh, 255 deathmatch mode, 43–44 Deep Blue, 86 DeepMind, 86–88, 94, 98 déjà vu, 240–41 delayed-choice double slit experiment, 145f delayed-choice experiment, 143–46 delayed-measurement experiment, 146 DELTA t (T), 174 Department of Defense (DOD), 232 Descartes, René, 11 DeWitt, Bryce, 149 dharma, 191 Dick, Leslie “Tessa” B., 8–9 Dick, Philip K., 274, 289 and alternate realities, 8–9 computer simulations and variables, 19 and implanted memories, 77–78 life as computer-generated simulation, 78–79 Metz Sci-Fi Convention, 1977, 2 question of reality vs. fiction, 71–72 simulated worlds, 80 speculative technologies, 53 digital consciousness, 116–18 digital film resolution, 65 digital immortality, 82, 105 digital psychiatrist, 88–89, 161 directed graph, 153–55 Discrete World, 165–66 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 9 Donkey Kong, 1 Doom, 43–44, 43f, 59–60, 137–38 DOTA 2, 87, 94 dot-matrix printers (2D), 69–71 double slit experiment, 128–29, 129f downloadable consciousness, 54, 101–4, 198, 207, 281 downloadable consciousness and seventh yoga, 197–99 Dr.


Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

A few decades from now the state of traffic prediction software could reach new levels we can only dream about today. When driverless cars analyze years of traffic data, we may discover that their prediction software uncovers complex dependencies between distant, seemingly unrelated traffic situations. City planners will find that one traffic situation will indirectly trigger another in what’s known as a butterfly effect; for example, a seemingly trivial road closing will cause severe traffic delays on several distant roads ten hours later. Route-planning and traffic-prediction software will do more than just plan a route, predict traffic congestion, and guide the car to avoid it. Route-planning software will take a big picture view of the traffic patterns of an entire city.

See Controls engineering Automotive industry Competition with software companies, 46–55, 63 Driverless car impact on, 47, 52–55 Future of car design, 266–268 Incremental approach, 45 Industry insularity, 49–51 Possible strategies, 52–55 Automotive operating system Challenges of creating, 55–63, 68–75, 87–93, 98–102 Overview of, 47, 66, 67 See also Controls engineering; High-level controls; Low-level controls; Mid-level controls AUVSI conference, 47 Aviation operating systems Backprop algorithm. See Error backpropogation Bar detectors. See Edge detectors Bel Geddes, Norman, 110, 111 Bengio, Yoshua, 224 Business models, 263–272 Butterfly effect, 244 Caltech-101, 219 Cambrian Explosion, 9, 283 CAN bus, 192–195 Car industry. See Automotive industry Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), 68–72, 151, 157, 166, 274. See also NREC CHIMP, 69–71 Cities. See Downtowns Closed world, 5 Cloud robotics, 285 CMU. See Carnegie Mellon University CNNs.


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

A network is defined by connections, and network theory seeks to supply useful definitions of network complexity and analyze the stability of various network structures. Nonlinearity and Complexity Nonlinear systems are complex because a change in one component can propagate through the system to lead to surprising and apparently disproportionate effects elsewhere, for example, the famous “butterfly effect.” Indeed, as we first learned from Henri Poincaré’s analysis of the three-body problem in 1889, which later developed into the field of chaos theory, even simple nonlinear systems can lead to intractably complex results. The dominant and nearly inescapable form of nonlinearity for human systems is not strictly found in the social, organizational, or legal norms we follow, or in how people behave in a given environment; it is in the complexity of the dynamics, of the feedback cycle between these two.

The shorter the wavelength the greater the amount of energy that hits the electron and the more accurate the measurement, but the greater the energy hitting the electron the greater the impact on its velocity. 11. There is yet another limitation to knowing the present sufficiently to forecast, first propounded by Edward Lorenz (1963), and popularly illustrated by the “butterfly effect.” Lorenz showed that for many nonlinear systems even the slightest error in measurement will be compounded over time to cause a forecast to veer increasingly off course. 12. Soros (1987). Also see Soros (2013) and related articles in that issue, and the first two lectures in Soros (2010). 13.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Addressing such seemingly innocuous questions concerning how systems respond to a change in their size has had remarkably profound consequences across the entire spectrum of science, engineering, and technology and has affected almost every aspect of our lives. Scaling arguments have led to a deep understanding of the dynamics of tipping points and phase transitions (how, for example, liquids freeze into solids or vaporize into gases), chaotic phenomena (the “butterfly effect” in which the mythical flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil leads to a hurricane in Florida), the discovery of quarks (the building blocks of matter), the unification of the fundamental forces of nature, and the evolution of the universe after the Big Bang. These are but a few of the more spectacular examples where scaling arguments have been instrumental in illuminating important universal principles or structure.9 In a more practical context, scaling plays a critical role in the design of increasingly large human-engineered artifacts and machines, such as buildings, bridges, ships, airplanes, and computers, where extrapolating from the small to the large in an efficient, cost-effective fashion is a continuing challenge.

Complex systems often manifest chaotic behavior in which a small change or perturbation in one part of the system produces an exponentially enhanced response in some other part. As we discussed earlier, in traditional linear thinking a small perturbation produces a commensurately small response. The highly nonintuitive enhancement in nonlinear systems is popularly expressed as “the butterfly effect,” in which the mythical flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil produces a hurricane in Florida. Despite 150 years of intense theoretical and experimental study, a general understanding of turbulence remains an unsolved problem in physics even though we have learned an enormous amount about it.

., 179 bacteria, 1, 79 metabolic rate of, 93, 94, 96 bacterial colonies, 220–22, 290–91, 291 Bank of Korea, 406 bankruptcies, 33, 396 survivorship curves, 396–97, 398 Barber, Benjamin, 262 Bartholomew, John, 330 basal metabolic rate, 18–19, 90–93, 160 Batty, Michael, 291, 294–95 Bavinger House, 259 beam experiment, 42 Beckham, David, 63 bell curve, 56, 314 Bergman, Ingmar, 178, 179–80 Bettencourt, Luis, 274–75, 341, 356, 364 Big Bang, 16, 198, 339, 429 big data, 57, 270, 325, 338, 439–48 Big Data Institute (BDI), 442–43 Big Picture, 1–33 cities and global sustainability, 28–32 companies and businesses, 32–33 energy, metabolism, and entropy, 12–15 exponentially expanding socioeconomic urbanized world, 8–10 growth from cells to whales, 25–28 introduction, overview, and summary, 1–8 matter of life and death, 10–12 scaling and complexity, 19–25 scaling and nonlinear behavior, 15–19 big-picture theory of cities, 6, 269–71, 325–26, 338 biological metabolic rate, 13, 373 biological networks, 103–5, 104, 111–18, 153–54, 284–85 biological time, 327 biology, 7, 10, 11, 13 mathematics and, 85–86, 87 physics and, 83–84, 105–11 biomechanical constraints, 122, 158–63 biophysics, 83–84 birth control, 227, 229 Black Swan, The (Taleb), 383 blood flow, 74, 118–20, 124–26, 128–29, 155 blood pressure, 51, 89, 125–26, 162 blue whales, 1, 18, 91, 119, 158, 159–60, 234 body functions, decline by age, 195, 197, 201, 202 body mass, 18–19 life spans scale, 195–96 metabolic rate of animals, 2, 2n, 3, 13, 18–19, 25–26, 91–92, 285–86 body-mass index (BMI), 55–56, 57–59 body temperature, 51, 173–78 extending life span and, 203–4 body weight and drug dosages, 53–55 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 109 Bombay, growth curve, 375 border paradox, 135, 136–40, 138, 152 Boston, 261, 278 movement in, 348–49, 349–50, 353–54 Boulding, Kenneth, 229 bounded growth, 31, 173, 391 Bragg, Lawrence, 437 Bragg, William, 437 brain matter, 93, 94, 96, 104 brain size and social groups, 308–9 branching, 151–52, 154, 155, 157 area-preserving, 120–22, 154, 157 branching ratio, 306–7 Brand, Stewart, 211–12 Brasilia, 257–58, 267, 268 Brenner, Sydney, 111, 443 bridges, 60–62, 298–300 British Classical Association, 86 British Meteorological Office, 132 broccoli, 126–27, 127 Brown, James, 105–7, 110 Brown, Jim, 174, 386 Brownsville, Texas, 358 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 63–68, 65, 70–71, 86, 177 Brunel, Marc, 64 Bryson, Bill, 266 budget, U.S., 233–34 Burundi, 9 business diversity, 363–71 business ecosystem, 249–50 businesses. See companies business mortality. See company mortality “butterfly effect,” 16, 72 Calico, 184 Calment, Jeanne, 188–90 caloric restriction, 205–7, 206 Cambridge University, 263, 265 Canberra, 266 capillaries, 113–14, 116, 119, 125, 151, 160 capitalism, 211, 228, 233, 369, 380 car accidents, 244 cardiac power output, 118–22 cardiovascular disease, 126, 193, 193–94 cargo ships, 66–68 Carnegie Mellon University, 369–70, 381–82 Caro, Anthony, 299 cauliflower, 126–27, 127 cell phone data, as detector of human behavior, 337–45, 351–52, 439 cells, 6, 17, 21, 25–27, 88, 100–103 metabolic rate of, 93, 94, 96 centenarians, 188–89 central place theory, 288–90, 347 Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), 294–95 champion weight lifters, strength of, 48–51, 49, 352–53 charge conservation, 197–98 Chekhov, Anton, 199 Chernobyl disaster, 244 chessboard problem, 218–20, 219 Chicago, 310 childhood mortality, 185–86 China, 280 new cities, 10, 267, 268 one-child policy, 227 Chinese stock market, 389–90, 390 cholesterol, 441 Christaller, Walter, 288–91, 289 Churchill, Winston, 63 circulatory system, 6, 104, 117, 118–22, 124–26, 327 impedance matching, 122–23, 128–29 metabolic rate and, 118–22, 124–26, 157 Navier-Stokes equation, 71 quarter-power scaling, 27, 113, 147, 148, 150–51 cities big-picture theory of, 6, 269–71, 325–26, 338 as biological organisms, 10–12, 247–53, 372–73 characteristics of, 271–74, 273 commuting time and size of, 332–35 consequences and predictions, 325–78 definitions of, 461–62n exponential growth of.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

Whether such circuit breakers will trigger gradual, managed, and orderly change or sudden, uncontrollable chaos is uncertain. But the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to effect constructive change. Experts agree that even remote minor events can trigger failure of complex systems. This has been termed the “butterfly effect” and characterized as “the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York,” meaning that even slight disturbances may have dramatic consequences.42 As Wallerstein explains, disorderly transitions are usually painful because they entail battles over pieces of the pie.43 As paradigms shift, “structures and processes oscillate wildly,” as manifested by volatile markets, fragile economies, and geopolitical conflicts.

., 115 Bloomberg, Michael, 75 Bloomberg Tower, 125 Bodmer mansion, 122 Bolten, Joshua, 85 Bolton, Tamiko, 27 Bonino, Emma, 27 Bono, 27 Borio, Claudio, 214 Botin, Ana, 121, 148 Boulud, Daniel, 205 Brain, 6 Branson, Richard, 115 Bretton Woods Committee, 106 Bretton Woods Conference, 38, 106 Breuer, Rolf, 143 Brevan Howard, 43 Brexit, 213–214, 218 Bridgewater Associates, xxvii, 63, 70–71, 88 Brin, Sergey, 114 Brookings Institution, 105, 168–169 Brosens, Frank, 170 Brown, Gordon, 107, 205 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 212 Budapest Festival Orchestra, 27 Buffett, Warren, 225 Barack Obama and, 174 Berkshire reputation and, 40, 59–60 family and, 135, 137 “Giving Pledge” participation by, 70, 128 Buiter, Willem, 45 Bull by the Horns, 56, 176 Bundesbank, 32, 37, 42, 120, 223 Burda DLA Nightcap, 115 Burnout, 137 Bush, George H. W., 16 Bush, George W., 24, 61, 84–85, 173, 183 Business schools, 81 “Butterfly effect,” 219 Buying of influence, 176 C Calello, Paul, 138 Calgene, 201 Callan, Erin, 157–158 Camdessus, Michel, 39 Cantor Fitzgerald, 76 Capital human, 26, 80 network, 189 political, 169 relational, 97 social. See Social capital transactional, 168 Capitalism, 209–213, 219, 221 Caramoor Estate, 27 “Carlton affair,” 194–195 Carlyle Bank, 105 Carney, Mark, 39, 43, 57, 222 Cass, Stephen, 201 Catalonia, 212 “Catch me if you can” culture, 223 Cayman Islands, 211 Cayne, James, 56 Central bank(s), xxv, 6, 10, 32–33, 37 Central Bank of Canada, 57 Central Bank of Italy, 177 Central bankers conflicts of interest, 42 description of, 33 financiers and, 43 proximity to, 42 Central Park, 90, 199 Centre for Economic Policy Research, 43 Centre for Financial Analysis, 43 CEOs.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Over the years, researchers have studied a number of different types of cumulative advantage models, but they all have the flavor that even tiny random fluctuations tend to get bigger over time, generating potentially enormous differences in the long run, a phenomenon that is similar to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory, which says that a butterfly fluttering its wings in China can lead to a hurricane months later and oceans away.14 As with Granovetter’s model, cumulative advantage models have disruptive implications for the kinds of explanations that we give of success and failure in cultural markets.

The U.S. economy, for example, is the product of the individual actions of millions of people, as well as hundreds of thousands of firms, thousands of government agencies, and countless other external and internal factors, ranging from the weather in Texas to interest rates in China. Modeling the trajectory of the economy is therefore not like modeling the trajectory of a rocket. In complex systems, tiny disturbances in one part of the system can get amplified to produce large effects somewhere else—the “butterfly effect” from chaos theory that came up in the earlier discussion of cumulative advantage and unpredictability. When every tiny factor in a complex system can get potentially amplified in unpredictable ways, there is only so much that a model can predict. As a result, models of complex systems tend to be rather simple—not because simple models perform well, but because incremental improvements make little difference in the face of the massive errors that remain.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

The problems of food production and oxygen loss are not inherent to bioregenerative systems; they were specific to the Biosphere design and can be corrected. Most of the problems encountered were unforeseen and some were unforeseeable. Complex, miniature ecosystems are subject to nonlinear effects that compound over time. Call it the butterfly effect. Since colonists won’t be able to live exclusively in a bubble, another crucial piece of equipment is a spacesuit. Spacesuits have changed very little since the 1960s; the Americans, Russians, and Chinese all use bulky and clunky suits that offer safety but limited mobility.9 A spacesuit has to deal with vacuum and temperature extremes; it has to protect against micrometeorites and infiltration by dust; it has to provide breathable air; and it has to monitor the occupant’s vital signs.

Frank, 188 behavioral b’s, 15 Bell X-1, 71 Bell, Alexander Graham, 78 Bell Labs, 153 Benford, Gregory, 223–24 Benford, James, 223–24 Bennett, Charles, 230 Bering Strait, land bridge across, 8, 120, 218 Berlin Rocket Society, 32 Berlin Wall, 41 Berners-Lee, Tim, 78–79 Bernoulli, Daniel, 68 Berserker series (Saberhagen), 177, 259 Bezos, Jeff, 103 Bible, 148–49 big bang theory, 131, 255 “Big Ear” telescope, 237 Bigelow, Robert, 102–3 binary stars, 126 biohackers (grinders), 207 biomarkers, 216–18 Biosphere 2 experiment, 192–97, 193, 285–86 black projects, 69–70, 72, 144 Blade Runner, 204, 208, 259 Blue Origin, 103 Boeing X-37, 72, 85 Bohr, Niels, 213, 288 Bostrom, Nick, 207, 245–47, 260–61 Bounty, HMS, 202 Bradbury, Ray, 164 brains: computer interfaces with, 205–7 human, 12–17, 203, 283 of orcas, 190 radiation damage to, 115 simulation of, 259–61 “brain in a vat” concept, 260 Branson, Holly and Sam, 89 Branson, Richard Charles Nicholas, 80, 86–89, 95, 97–98, 101–2, 106 Breakthrough Propulsion Physics, 290 Brezhnev, Leonid, 42 Brightman, Sarah, 102 Brin, Sergey, 275 British Airways, 87 British Interplanetary Society, 221 Brokaw, Tom, 74 Brother Assassin (Saberhagen), 177 Bryan, Richard, 238 buckyballs, 151, 231 Buddhism, 20, 267 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 197 Buran, 72 Burnett, Mark, 75 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 164 Burrows, William, 35–36 Bush, George W., administration of, 93 Bussard, Robert, 222 butterfly effect, 195 By Rocket into Interplanetary Space (Oberth), 31 California, population dispersion into, 8 California, University of: at Irvine, 112, 223 at Los Angeles, 78 Calvin, William, 15 camera technology, 53, 176–77, 205 Cameron, James, 92, 120, 176 Canada, 142 canals, on Mars, 163 canards, 82–83 cancer, 180 cannonball, Newton’s experiment with, 25, 267 cannons: acceleration force of, 26 smooth-bore, 24 carbon, 172 in nanotechnology, 151–52, 182 as requirement for life, 123–24, 256 carbon dioxide, 132, 171, 172–73, 182, 193–94, 196, 218, 278 carbon nanotubes, 151–52 carbyne, 152 Cassini spacecraft, 52–53, 125, 182 Castro, Fidel, 41 casualties, early Chinese, 22 cataracts, 115 cats, 48–49, 251 causality principle, 230–31 cave paintings, 15 celestial property rights, 145–47 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 158 centrifuges, 114 Cerf, Vinton, 67 Chaffee, Roger, 43 Challenger, explosion of, 55–56, 56, 74, 107, 271 Chang’e 3 lunar probe, 143, 162 chemical fuels, 219–21, 220 chickens, research using, 26 chimpanzees, 14 genetic diversity of humans vs., 202 China: as averse to innovation, 109 in early attempts at space travel, 21–22, 22, 68, 139, 141 population dispersion into, 7 revolution in, 141 rocket development in, 23–24, 113 space program of, 139–44, 140, 161, 162, 195, 276 US relations with, 144 Christian, Fletcher, 202 Christianity, 20 Chuansheng Chen, 11 civilization: Type I, 253, 254, 257 Type II, 253–54, 254, 257 Type III, 253, 254, 257 Type IV, 253, 254, 255 Clarke, Arthur C., 149–50, 164, 185, 201, 252 climate change, 197–98, 286 Clinton, Bill, 154 cloning, 251 Clynes, Manfred, 205 Cocconi, Giuseppe, 187 Colbert, Stephen, 74, 117 Cold War, 35–39, 41–43, 50, 55, 73, 76, 139, 145, 197 Columbia, disintegration of, 55, 56, 107 Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, 107 Columbus, Christopher, 243 comets, 183 Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), 275 Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, 145 communication: with alien species, 52, 189, 234–35, 238, 239, 246, 253, 255, 259 by digital data transmission, 66–67, 77–80 latency and, 178 space technology in, 153–54 Compaq, 95 computation, future technology of, 258–62 confinement, psychological impact of, 169–70 Congress, US: legislation in, 78, 144 on space programs, 38, 41, 75, 156, 158 consciousness, simulation of, 259–61 conservation biology, 201 conspiracy theories, 238, 240 Constellation program, 104 Contact (film), 236–37, 242 Contact (Sagan), 236 contraception, 200 Copernicus, 19, 20, 127 Coriolis force, Coriolis effect, 152 cosmic rays, 115, 160, 160, 164, 167, 168, 204 cosmism, 27 cosmonauts, 141 disasters of, 108 records set by, 115 selection criteria for, 74 Cosmos 1, 184 cosmos, cosmology, ancient concepts of, 17–20 Cosmos Studios, 184 Cosmotheoros (Huygens), 163 counterfactual thinking, 14 Cronkite, Walter, 74 cryogenic suspension, 250–51 cryptobiosis, 123 cryptography, 231, 291 Cuban missile crisis, 41–42 CubeSat, 184–85 Cultural Revolution, Chinese, 141–42 Curiosity rover, 165, 167, 176, 181 cybernetics, 206–7 Cyborg Foundation, 288 cyborgs (cybernetic organisms), 204–8, 288 Cygnus capsule, 100 cytosine, 6 dark energy, 256 d’Arlandes, Marquis, 68 DARPANET, 78 Darwin, Charles, 265 “Darwin” (machine), 227 Death Valley, 118–19 deceleration, 222, 223 DeepSea Challenger sub, 120 deep space, 126–29 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 78, 224 Defense Department, US, 38, 78, 90, 153 De Garis, Hugo, 258 Delta rockets, 72, 113 Delta-V, 111 Democritus, 19 Destination Mir (reality show), 75 Diamandis, Peter, 90–94, 97–98, 147, 156 diamonds, 131, 231 Dick, Philip K., 204–5 Digital Equipment Corporation, 213 DNA, 6–7, 9, 19, 189, 202, 228, 251, 263, 265, 266 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Dick), 205 dogs: brains of, 13 in scientific research, 251 in space travel, 40, 47 Dolly (sheep), 251 Doomsday Clock, 197–98, 246, 286 dopamine, 10, 98 Doppler method, exoplanet detection and characterization by, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 215 Doppler shift, 127 Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, 33 Downey, Robert, Jr., 95 drag, in flight, 68, 83, 223 Drake, Frank, 187–88, 235, 237 Drake equation, 188, 189, 233–35, 237, 241, 243, 244, 253, 291–92 DRD4 alleles, 7R mutation in, 10–12, 11, 15, 98 Drexler, Eric, 226 drones, 180–81 Druyan, Ann, 184 Duke, Charles, 45 Dunn, Tony, 225 Dyson, Freeman, 226–27, 253 Dyson sphere, 253–54, 254 Earth: atmosphere of, 8, 70–71, 70 early impacts on, 50, 172 geological evolution of, 172 as one of many worlds, 17–20 planets similar to, 122, 124–26, 129–33, 224, 235 projected demise of, 197–98 as round, 19 as suited for human habitation, 118–22, 121, 234 as viewed from space, 45, 53, 121, 185, 270 Earth Return Vehicle, 169 “Earthrise” (Anders), 270 Earth similarity index, 215–16 eBay, 79, 95 Economist, The, 105 ecosystem, sealed and self-contained, 192–97, 193, 285 Eiffel Tower, 27, 149 Einstein, Albert, 220, 228, 256 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 36–39, 73, 79 electric cars, 96 electric solar sails, 186 electromagnetic waves, 186 e-mail, 78 embryo transport, 251 Enceladus, 177, 182, 227 potential habitability of, 125, 278 Encyclopædia Britannica, 95, 283 Endangered Species Act (1973), 201 energy: aliens’ use of, 190 civilizations characterized by use of, 252–57, 254, 258 dark, 256 declining growth in world consumption of, 257 Einstein’s equation for, 220 production and efficiency of, 219–24, 220 as requirement for life, 123–24 in rocket equation, 110 Engines of Creation (Drexler), 226 environmental disasters, 245 environmental protection: as applied to space, 147 movement for, 45, 235, 263, 270 Epicureans, 18 Epsilon Eridani, 187 Eratosthenes, 19 ethane, 52, 125 Ethernet, 213 eukaryotes, 172 Euripides, 18 Europa, 52, 97–98 potential habitability of, 125, 125, 161, 278 Europa Clipper mission, 98 Europe: economic depression in, 28 population dispersion into, 7–8, 11, 15 roots of technological development in, 23–24 European Southern Observatory, 133 European Space Agency, 159, 178–79 European Union, bureaucracy of, 106 Eustace, Alan, 120, 272 Evenki people, 119–20 Everest, Mount, 120 evolution: genetic variation in, 6, 203, 265 geological, 172 of human beings, 16–17 off-Earth, 203–4 evolutionary divergence, 201–4 exoplanets: Earth-like, 129–33, 215–18 extreme, 131–32 formation of, 215, 216 incidence and detection of, 126–33, 128, 233 exploration: as basic urge of human nature, 7–12, 109, 218, 261–63 imagination and, 262–63 explorer gene, 86 Explorer I, 38 explosives, early Chinese, 21–23 extinction, 201–2 extraterrestrials, see aliens, extraterrestrial extra-vehicular activities, 179 extremophiles, 122–23 eyeborg, 205–6 Falcon Heavy rocket, 114 Falcon rockets, 96, 97, 101, 184 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 82, 93, 105–7, 154 Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, 272 Felix and Félicette (cats), 48–49 Fermi, Enrico, 239–41 Fermilab, 254 “Fermi question,” 240–41, 243 Feynman, Richard, 179–80, 230, 270, 280 F4 Phantom jet fighter, 82 51 Peg (star), 126, 133 55 Cancri (star), 131 F-117 Nighthawk, 69 fine-tuning, 256, 294 fire arrows, 23, 68 fireworks, 21–24, 31 flagella, 180 flight: first human, 68 first powered, 69 principles of, 67–73 stability in, 82–83 “Fly Me to the Moon,” 45 food: energy produced by, 219, 220 in sealed ecosystem, 194–95 for space travel, 115–16, 159, 170 Forward, Robert, 223 Foundation series (Asimov), 94 founder effect, 202–3 Fountains of Paradise, The (Clarke), 149 France, 48, 68, 90 Frankenstein monster, 206, 259 Fresnel lens, 223 From Earth to the Moon (Verne), 183 fuel-to-payload ratio, see rocket equation Fukuyama, Francis, 207 Fuller, Buckminster, 151, 192 fullerenes, 151 Futron corporation, 155 Future of Humanity Institute, 245 “futurology,” 248–52, 249 Fyodorov, Nikolai, 26, 27 Gagarin, Yuri, 40–41, 41, 66, 269 Gaia hypothesis, 286 galaxies: incidence and detection of, 235 number of, 255 see also Milky Way galaxy Galileo, 49–50, 183, 270 Gandhi, Mahatma, 147 Garn, Jake, 114 Garn scale, 114 Garriott, Richard, 92 gas-giant planets, 125, 126–29 Gauss, Karl Friedrich, 238 Gazenko, Oleg, 47 Gemini program, 42 Genesis, Book of, 148–49 genetic anthropology, 6 genetic code, 5–7, 123 genetic diversity, 201–3 genetic drift, 203 genetic engineering, 245, 249 genetic markers, 6–7 genetics, human, 6–7, 9–12, 120, 201–4 Genographic Project, 7, 265 genome sequencing, 93, 202, 292 genotype, 6 “adventure,” 11–12, 98 geocentrism, 17, 19–20, 49 geodesic domes, 192 geological evolution, 172 George III, king of England, 147 German Aerospace Center, 178 Germany, Germans, 202, 238 rocket development by, 28, 30–34, 141 in World War II, 30–35 g-forces, 46–49, 48, 89, 111, 114 GJ 504b (exoplanet), 131 GJ 1214b (exoplanet), 132 glaciation, 172 Glenn Research Center, 219 global communications industry, 153–54 Global Positioning System (GPS), 144, 153–54 God, human beings in special relationship with, 20 Goddard, Robert, 28–32, 29, 36, 76, 78, 81–82, 94, 268 Goddard Space Flight Center, 178 gods, 20 divine intervention of, 18 Golden Fleece awards, 238 Goldilocks zone, 122, 126, 131 Gonzalez, Antonin, 215 Goodall, Jane, 14 Google, 80, 92, 185, 272, 275 Lunar X Prize, 161 Gopnik, Alison, 10, 13 Grasshopper, 101 gravity: centrifugal force in, 26, 114, 150 in flight, 68 of Mars, 181, 203 Newton’s theory of, 25, 267 and orbits, 25, 114–15, 127, 128, 149–50, 267 in rocket equation, 110 of Sun, 183 waves, 255 see also g-forces; zero gravity Gravity, 176 gravity, Earth’s: first object to leave, 40, 51 human beings who left, 45 as obstacle for space travel, 21, 105, 148 as perfect for human beings, 118 simulation of, 168–69 Great Art of Artillery, The (Siemienowicz), 267 Great Britain, 86, 106, 206, 227 “Great Filter,” 244–47 Great Leap Forward, 15–16 “Great Silence, The,” of SETI, 236–39, 240–41, 243–44 Greece, ancient, 17–19, 163 greenhouse effect, 171, 173 greenhouse gasses, 132, 278 Griffin, Michael, 57, 147, 285–86 grinders (biohackers), 207 Grissom, Gus, 43 guanine, 6 Guggenheim, Daniel, 81, 268 Guggenheim, Harry, 81 Guggenheim Foundation, 30, 81–82, 268 gunpowder, 21–24, 267 Guth, Alan, 257 habitable zone, 122, 124–26, 130–31, 132, 188, 241, 246, 277–78, 286, 291 defined, 124 Hadfield, Chris, 142 hair, Aboriginal, 8 “Halfway to Pluto” (Pettit), 273 Hanson, Robin, 247 haptic technology, 178 Harbisson, Neil, 205, 288 Harvard Medical School, 90 Hawking, Stephen, 88, 93, 198, 259 HD 10180 (star), 127 Heinlein, Robert, 177 Heisenberg compensator, 229 Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, 229–30 heliocentrism, 19 helium, 68 helium 3, 161–62 Herschel, William, 163 Higgs particle, 256 High Frontier, 146–47 Hilton, Paris, 88, 101–2 Hilton hotels, 145 Hinduism, 20 Hiroshima, 222 Hitler, Adolf, 32, 34 Hope, Dennis M., 145, 147 Horowitz, Paul, 237–38 hot Jupiters, 127–28, 130 Hubble Space Telescope, 56–57, 65, 218, 225 Huffington, Arianna, 92 human beings: as adaptable to challenging environments, 118–22 as alien simulations, 260–61, 260 creative spirit of, 73, 248 early global migration of, 5–12, 9, 11, 15, 19, 118, 120, 186, 202, 218, 262, 265 Earth as perfectly suited for, 118–22, 121 exploration intrinsic to nature of, 7–12, 109, 218, 261–63 first appearance of, 5, 15, 172, 234 impact of evolutionary divergence on, 201–4 as isolated species, 241–42 as lone intelligent life, 241, 243 merger of machines and, see cyborgs minimal viable population in, 201–2, 251 off-Earth, 203–4, 215, 250–52 requirements of habitability for, 122, 124–26, 129, 130–31 sense of self of, 232, 261 space as inhospitable to, 53–54, 114–17, 121, 123 space exploration by robots vs., 53–57, 66, 98, 133, 161, 177–79, 179, 208, 224–28 space travel as profound and sublime experience for, 45, 53, 117, 122 speculation on future of, 93, 94, 204, 207–8, 215, 244–47, 248–63, 249 surpassed by technology, 258–59 threats to survival of, 94, 207–8, 244–47, 250, 259–62, 286, 293 timeline for past and future of, 248–50, 249 transforming moment for, 258–59 Huntsville, Ala., US Space and Rocket Center in, 48 Huygens, Christiaan, 163 Huygens probe, 53 hybrid cars, 96 hydrogen, 110, 156, 159, 161, 187, 219, 222 hydrogen bomb, 36 hydrosphere, 173 hyperloop aviation concept, 95 hypothermia, 251 hypothetical scenarios, 15–16 IBM, 213 Icarus Interstellar, 224 ice: on Europa, 125 on Mars, 163–65, 227 on Moon, 159–60 ice ages, 7–8 ice-penetrating robot, 98 IKAROS spacecraft, 184 imagination, 10, 14, 20 exploration and, 261–63 immortality, 259 implants, 206–7 inbreeding, 201–3 India, 159, 161 inflatable modules, 101–2 inflation theory, 255–57, 255 information, processing and storage of, 257–60 infrared telescopes, 190 Inspiration Mars, 170–71 Institute for Advanced Concepts, 280 insurance, for space travel, 106–7 International Academy of Astronautics, 152 International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), 37 International Institute of Air and Space Law, 199 International MicroSpace, 90 International Scientific Lunar Observatory, 157 International Space Station, 55, 64–65, 64, 71, 75, 91, 96, 100, 102, 142, 143, 144, 151, 153, 154, 159, 178–79, 179, 185, 272, 275 living conditions on, 116–17 as staging point, 148 supply runs to, 100–101, 104 International Space University, 90 International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), 105–6, 144 Internet: Congressional legislation on, 78, 144 development of, 76–77, 77, 94, 95, 271 erroneous predictions about, 213–14 limitations of, 66–67 robotics and, 206 space travel compared to, 76–80, 77, 80 Internet Service Providers (ISPs), 78 interstellar travel, 215–18 energy technology for, 219–24 four approaches to, 251–52 scale model for, 219 Intrepid rovers, 165 Inuit people, 120 Io, 53, 177 property rights on, 145 “iron curtain,” 35 Iron Man, 95 isolation, psychological impact of, 169–70 Jacob’s Ladder, 149 Jade Rabbit (“Yutu”), 139, 143, 161 Japan, 161, 273 Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), 184 Jefferson, Thomas, 224 Jemison, Mae, 224 jet engines, 69–70 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 141 Johnson, Lyndon, 38, 42, 45, 158, 269 Johnson Space Center, 76, 104, 179, 206, 229, 269 see also Mission Control Jones, Stephanie Tubbs, 74 Joules per kilogram (MJ/kg), 219–20, 222 Journalist in Space program, 74 “junk” DNA, 10, 266 Juno probe, 228 Jupiter, 126, 127, 177, 217, 270 distance from Earth to, 50 moons of, 97, 125, 125 probes to, 51–52, 228 as uninhabitable, 125 Justin (robot), 178 Kaku, Michio, 253 Karash, Yuri, 65 Kardashev, Nikolai, 253 Kardashev scale, 253, 254, 258 Kármán line, 70, 70, 101 Kennedy, John F., 41–43, 45 Kepler, Johannes, 183 Kepler’s law, 127 Kepler spacecraft and telescope, 128, 128, 129–31, 218, 278 Khrushchev, Nikita, 42, 47 Kickstarter, 184 Killian, James, 38 Kline, Nathan, 205 Knight, Pete, 71 Komarov, Vladimir, 43, 108 Korean War, 141 Korolev, Sergei, 35, 37 Kraft, Norbert, 200 Krikalev, Sergei, 115 Kunza language, 119 Kurzweil, Ray, 94, 207, 259 Laika (dog), 47, 65, 269 Laliberté, Guy, 75 landings, challenges of, 51, 84–85, 170 Lang, Fritz, 28, 268 language: of cryptography, 291 emergence of, 15, 16 of Orcas, 190 in reasoning, 13 Lansdorp, Bas, 170–71, 198–99, 282 lasers, 223, 224, 225–26, 239 pulsed, 190, 243 last common ancestor, 6, 123, 265 Late Heavy Bombardment, 172 latency, 178 lava tubes, 160 legislation, on space, 39, 78, 90, 144, 145–47, 198–200 Le Guin, Ursula K., 236–37 Leonov, Alexey, 55 L’Garde Inc., 284 Licancabur volcano, 119 Licklider, Joseph Carl Robnett “Lick,” 76–78 life: appearance and evolution on Earth of, 172 artificial, 258 detection of, 216–18 extension of, 26, 207–8, 250–51, 259 extraterrestrial, see aliens, extraterrestrial intelligent, 190, 235, 241, 243, 258 requirements of habitability for, 122–26, 125, 129, 131–33, 241, 256–57 lifetime factor (L), 234–335 lift, in flight, 68–70, 83 lift-to-drag ratio, 83 light: from binary stars, 126 as biomarker, 217 Doppler shift of, 127 momentum and energy from, 183 speed of, 178, 228–29, 250, 251 waves, 66 Lindbergh, Charles, 30, 81–82, 90–91, 268 “living off the land,” 166, 200 logic, 14, 18 Long March, 141 Long March rockets, 113, 142, 143 Long Now Foundation, 293 Los Alamos, N.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

In this section I am following the outline of the theory as presented in A. Kliman, Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency (Plymouth, 2007) 13. http://www.Icddrb.org/who-we-are/gender-issues/daycare 14. K. Allen, ‘The Butterfly Effect: Chinese Dorms and Bangladeshi Factory Fires’, Financial Times, 25 April 2013, http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2013/04/25/the-butterfly-effect-chinese-dorms-and-bangladeshi-factory-fires/? 15. J. Robinson, Economic Philosophy (Cambridge, 1962) 16. A. Einstein, ‘Physics and Reality’, Journal of The Franklin Institute, vol. 221 (1936), pp. 349–82 17. OECD, ‘Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators’, OECD, 2014, p. 14 18.


pages: 338 words: 106,936

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

This observation, a result of one of the very first computer simulations in service of a scientific problem, contradicted every classical expectation regarding how things like weather worked. (Lorenz quickly showed that much simpler systems, such as pendulums and water wheels, things that you could build in your basement, also exhibited a sensitivity to initial conditions.) The basic idea of chaos is summed up by another accidental contribution of Lorenz’s: the so-called butterfly effect, which takes its name from a paper that Lorenz gave at the 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science called “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” (Lorenz never took credit for the title. He claimed one of the conference organizers came up with it when Lorenz forgot to submit one.)

“. . . first developed by a man named Edward Lorenz”: The biographical and historical details concerning Lorenz and the history of chaos theory are from Gleick (1987) and Lorenz (1993). “. . . the work of two physicists named James Yorke and Tien-Yien Li . . .”: The article is Li and Yorke (1975). “. . . the so-called butterfly effect . . .”: The paper is Lorenz (2000). Lorenz never used the metaphor of a butterfly flapping its wings, though he sometimes used a similar metaphor involving a seagull. “. . . Farmer through reading A. H. Morehead . . .”: Farmer read Morehead (1967); Packard read Thorp (1966). “. . . where the ball lands is sensitive to the initial conditions . . .”: Although there is some controversy concerning just what should count as a truly chaotic system, virtually everyone would agree that roulette is not chaotic.


pages: 356 words: 105,533

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

And since the computer programs were now linked across markets—stock trades were synced to currencies and commodities and futures and bonds—and since many of the programs were very similar and were massively leveraged, the fear haunting the minds of the Plumbers was that the entire system could snap like a brittle twig in a matter of minutes. A chaotic butterfly effect could erase everyone’s hard-earned savings in an eyeblink and, for kicks, throw the global economy into yet another Wall Street–spawned tailspin. The pieces were already in place. Exchanges from Singapore to China to Europe to the United States were linking up through a vast web of algo traders dabbling in every tradable security in the world.

DAVE CLIFF: It’s a big change that’s happened in the last 10 or 15 years as everything has become computerized and as every computer can talk to any other computer. Suddenly, in principle, an error or a failure in one system, that would have been an isolated event, can have negative effects that ripple out in a chain reaction over a whole network. HFTR: And then you have the whole “butterfly effect”? CLIFF: Yes exactly. And one of the things that we have focused on in that project for the last five years is the extent on which the global financial markets are now essentially a single, planetary-wide, ultra-large scale complex IT system. And the extent to which there are failure modes like those I saw in FX back in 2005 might, in principle, ripple out over the entire system and cause big problems.


Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline by Steven K. Kapp

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, book value, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, demand response, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, epigenetics, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Internet Archive, Jeremy Corbyn, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, slashdot, theory of mind, twin studies, universal basic income, Wayback Machine

I felt as though I was being forced to close my business because I could not make enough money, yet I was regularly being asked to attend autism events and speak for free. I remember posting something on my personal Facebook feed about how I was fed up of not having my time valued and how I would no longer support charities and organizations who claimed Autism in their title but who did not value our time enough to pay us. 268 M. Craine The Butterfly Effect: Reaching the Right Person A Facebook friend commented on my post, saying I should meet her friend Janine Booth as she thought we had a lot in common. At this time I was still not very good at introducing myself to new people through the internet; my Facebook account was only used for my real-life family and friends.

See vaccines, and autism Autism Acceptance Day/Autism Acceptance Month 12 Autism Act (2009) (UK) 15 autism advocacy 11, 14, 24, 98, 157, 306, 308 and Autism Speaks, 221, 228, 230 AutismAndRace.com 250 autism-as-tragedy paradigm 26–27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 91, 229 Autism Awareness Day 239 autism diagnosis 23, 90, 167–189, 263, 296 Autism Dividend, The 282 “autism epidemic” 92, 94, 223, 238 Autism Every Day 95, 130, 148 Autism Hub 97, 126, 129–131 Autism in Adulthood 140 Index Autism/Neurodiversity Manifesto 3, 15, 255–274 autism policy 221 autism quackery 156 autism research 151, 224, 229, 311, 312 and dehumanization, 73 ethical concerns with, 7 participatory, 13, 133, 139 problematic, 135 autism rights v, 1, 2, 8, 14, 305, 308 Autism Society of America 12, 83, 95, 180 Autism Speaks 130, 131, 221–231, 278, 279 autism spectrum 9, 169, 170, 180, 185, 248, 298 autism therapy ix, 6, 60 autism-vaccine disinformation 158 autism-vaccine litigation 96 Autistica 277–281 autistic activism 46, 75, 116, 131, 134–141, 307 autistic culture 1, 35–37 “Autistic Distinction, The” 92–93 Autistic Genocide Clock v, 13, 123–131, 307 autistic identity 134, 158, 201, 306 Autistic Passing Project 174 Autistic Pride Day 12 Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) 9, 130–131, 136, 148–150, 158, 231 DSM-5 lobbying/recommendations by, 167–189, 309 autistic space 4, 13, 35, 111–114, 117, 118, 120, 121 321 autistic spectrum (InLv), independent living on the 41–48, 109, 110 Autistics Speaking Day 12 “autistic superiority” 73, 289 autistics.org 12, 65–75, 134, 295, 307 autistic traits 26, 70, 91, 120, 126, 288, 296 and DSM-5, 172, 176, 185, 187, 189 autoethnography 216 autonomy 2, 8, 58, 198, 206, 246, 277, 305, 313 Autonomy (journal) 14, 211–219, 307 Autreat 12, 13, 24, 30, 35, 36, 48, 97, 216, 310 and Autscape, 109, 110, 112–114 Autscape 13, 48, 109–121, 282, 292, 295, 307, 310 aversives 200, 203, 205, 206 “awareness” 83, 198, 238 AWN (Autistic Women and NonBinary Network) 13, 147–154, 157 B Baggs, Mel 57, 98, 158, 198, 295, 298 Bartak, Lawrence 27 BBS (bulletin board systems) 41, 43, 44 behaviorism 58, 175, 195–196, 198, 279 Berkowitz, Lori 151, 246 Bettelheim, Bruno 68, 68n2 biology 3, 5, 46, 225, 228, 288, 297 bio-medicalization 296 322 Index biomedical model, Western 8 Birmingham, University of 57, 60, 215, 218, 280 blogging 129, 134, 161, 201, 258–260 Blume, Harvey 45, 47, 90 Booth, Janine 268–270, 274 Bovell, Virginia 58, 277 Bowen, Paul 59, 60 Breakstone, Savannah Logsdon 150, 151 Bridging the Gaps 31, 32 broad autism phenotype/broader autistic phenotype 91, 288 broader autism community vii, 15, 311 Brook, Kabie 283, 284 Brown, Lydia X.Z. 243, 310 bullying 67, 69, 70, 119, 313 Burns, Charles 110 “butterfly effect” 268–269 C CAFETY (Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth) 202 Cal (Cal Montgomery) 65, 73, 78, 83, 198, 199, 295, 310 CARD (Center for Autism and Related Disorders) ix caregivers/caregiving 6, 311, 312 Carley, Michael John 170, 181 Carlock, William 26 CAS (Critical Autism Studies) 9, 211, 219, 307 catatonia 42, 47, 52, 55 causation, of autism 25, 26, 95, 149, 155, 238, 312 environmental, 3, 6, 8, 96 CBPR (Community Based Participatory Research) 134–137, 140 “challenging behaviors” 52 chemical restraints 237, 307 chronic illnesses 3 civil rights 41, 126, 127, 129, 134, 136, 234 civil rights movements 10, 66, 72, 147, 152 class 3, 5, 67, 167, 171, 187, 197 clinical practice 183, 189 Clinton, Hillary 237–239, 306 cognitive abilities/cognitive capabilities 185, 309, 313 cognitive demands 172, 178 cognitive differences 29, 92, 93, 99, 309 cognitive impacts 172, 178 cognitive profiles 309 cognitive variety 29, 92, 93, 99, 309 Colley, Mary 214 communication 3, 11, 26, 61, 98.


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The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

Many times I fantasize about going back in time to that day and bitch-slapping that arrogant kid-I wish I could tell him how things are; I wish I could have him read this chapter; I wish he would understand the trajectory, the horsepower, of his choices. Our choices have consequences that transcend decades. This transcendence is horsepower. Every day my discomfort reminds me of that fateful day when I chose poorly. And today, I'm still paying the mortgage of that choice, a mortgage that never amortizes. The Butterfly Effect Can you make a choice this instant that can forever alter the trajectory of your future? You can, and it can be the difference between poverty and wealth. When you make minor permutations (choices) that deviate from your initial conditions, profound effects transpire over time. Think of it like a golf club striking a golf ball.

For example, when I moved to Phoenix from Chicago, the “impact differential” exploded as time passed. Had I not made this choice my life would be significantly different. I also chose to get a dead-end job as a limo driver, which opened my eyes to a business need. That too was a choice that had extraordinary horsepower and created positive “impact differential.” The 2003 movie The Butterfly Effect starring Ashton Kutcher is great film that excellently illustrates choice horsepower. In the movie, the main characters engage in treasonous choices as youngsters, and you witness how each life unfolds as those treasonous choices permeate through time. You see the impact differential! Recognize that every day you make decisions that will ripple through the years.


pages: 298 words: 43,745

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising by Jim Jansen

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, bounce rate, business intelligence, butterfly effect, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, data science, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, folksonomy, Future Shock, information asymmetry, information retrieval, intangible asset, inventory management, life extension, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine translation, megacity, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, PageRank, place-making, power law, price mechanism, psychological pricing, random walk, Schrödinger's Cat, sealed-bid auction, search costs, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, software as a service, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the market place, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

., systems that follow a fixed rule over time), where the system is highly dependent on Bringing It All Together initial conditions. This means that very slight fluctuations in the initial conditions can radically affect the end state of the system. So, a ball balancing on a hilltop (using the classic example) may fall in many directions depending on very slightly changing atmospheric conditions. Known commonly as the butterfly effect, these small changes in initial conditions make long-term prediction impossible. However, a chaotic system is not random. These systems are dynamical so their future state is determined by the initial state. These systems only appear to be random because slight changes are amplified so much over time.

., 131 bounded rationality, 98, 100 Boyce, Rick, 10 brand, 6, 14–15, 25, 69–70, 74, 95, 103, 111–122, 126–127, 129–130, 140–142, 144, 201, 207, 221, 223, 225 brand advertising, 126 Brand attitude, 116 brand awareness, 113 brand equity, 114 brand familiarity, 116 brand image, 1, 14–15, 70, 103, 112–114, 117, 120, 141 Brand recall, 114, 117 Brand recognition, 113, 117 Brand relationship, 114–115, 117 273 274 Index Brand trust, 116–117 branded keyphrases, 119–120, 141, 183, 187 branded terms, 41, 69–70, 186 branding, xiii, 16, 65, 69, 103, 106, 111–114, 116–118, 120–121, 126, 128–129, 131, 135, 140–142, 149, 171, 177, 190, 199, 203, 207–209, 213, 227 Brewer, Jeffrey, 11 Brin, Sergey, 206, 217–218 Broder, Andrei, 44 Brooks, Nico, 76–77 Bullington, Brett, 12 butterfly effect, 205 buying decision, 98–99, 130 buying funnel, 86, 93–98, 101, 103–106, 129–130, 210, 213 Capitani, 74 Caples, John, 127 CA$HVERTISING, 125 causation, 153 caveat emptor, 179 chaos theory, 204 check-in applications, 224 choice set, 71, 79, 94, 120, 130 Choice uncertainty, 99 classic advertising appeals, 124 click fraud, 167–168, 170, 221 Click potential, 76 clickthrough lift, 124 click-through rate, 24, 74–75, 178, See€clickthrough rate, 14–15 The Cluetrain Manifesto, 129 Commercial Alert, 21 communication process, 32–33, 36, 54, 86, 101–103, 105–106, 111, 207, 210, 213 communication theory, 86 complexity theory, 204 comScore, 152 concept of chunking, 42 concept of technological innovation, 5 consumer behavior, xiii, 86, 89, 94, 96, 98, 101, 103, 105–106, 129 consumer buying behavior, 98, 103 consumer buying process, 94, 98, 100–101, 104, 106 consumer decision making, 86, 93–95, 101, 105, 208, 213 consumer purchasing behavior, 86 consumer search process, 48, 90, 93, 98 consumer searching, 41, 47, 63, 86–87, 90, 93, 95, 98–99, 210 consumer searching behavior, 41, 86, 95, 210 content targeting, 19 context, ix, x, xiii, xix, xx, xxi, 1, 11, 32–33, 36, 43, 69, 86, 88, 91–92, 97, 100–103, 106, 112, 114–115, 119, 126–128, 131, 157, 159–164, 166, 177, 187, 212, 217, 220, 224, 226 contextual advertising, xii, 19, 225 Conversion potential, 76 Corporate branding, 112 Correlation, 153 Credence goods, 39–40 creditability, 150 Culliton, James, 131 curiosity, i, ix, x, xiv, 46, 125 Customer brand image, 120 customer market segmentation, 120 Database of Intentions, 31 dayparting, 184, 186 Delhagen, Kate, 12 determinants, 92–93, 98, 118 Direct Hit Technologies, 21 direct response, 126 direct response advertising, 126 Doc Seals, 129 dominate, 125 east, 22, 24, 72 ebay, 179 Ebbinghaus, H., 74 economic theory, 49, 91 effectiveness, 24, 35, 113, 118, 145, 149, 151, 159, 170, 180, 210 efficiency, 62, 151, 170, 180, 210 empirical methods, xii erosion, 159–160 escape, 125 Esch, F.


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Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, butterfly effect, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Fall of the Berlin Wall, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, Peter Singer: altruism, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, social discount rate, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, zero-sum game

You might assume that aggregate global outcomes are mostly stable with respect to small perturbations in the basic events of daily life. You might think, for example, that the logic of positive-sum trade and the power of human reason to advance technological progress will win out in the long run, with or without Hitler on Earth. Other offshoots of these butterfly effects may cancel out or offset each other in the longer run; Tolstoy, in his novel War and Peace, argued that the “great men” of history had little impact, as their acts would be reversed by their successors (Napoleon being one case in point). While part of me wishes that this logic were true, the brute reality is that contingency is real and disturbances to the flow of temporal events need not dwindle into insignificance, given that even a small act can reshape the entire future genetic history of humanity.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

The complex dynamic models we considered in Chapter 9, such as Lorenz’s model of atmospheric turbulence, are non-ergodic.34 The past history of a complex model is not a reliable guide to its future behavior, because where the model will evolve to is dependent on where it starts from – the so-called ‘Butterfly Effect’ applies. Two situations with differences in initial conditions that are too small to be distinguished from each other will have drastically different outcomes in the future: they will be similar for a short while (which is why weather forecasting is accurate only about a week in advance) but then diverge completely.

It is properly defined by the Wiktionary (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ergodic), and the Wikipedia entry on ergodic Theory (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ergodic_theory) makes the important point that ‘For the special class of ergodic systems, the time average is the same for almost all initial points: statistically speaking, the system that evolves for a long time “forgets” its initial state.’ This is not the case for complex or chaotic models, which show ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’ (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory). 35 I can think of no more apt term to describe the group that led the campaign to make macroeconomics a branch of neoclassical microeconomics. Certainly the neoclassical attitude to researchers who refused to use ‘rational expectations’ in their models approached the old mafia cliché of ‘an offer you can’t refuse’: ‘assume rational expectations, or your paper won’t get published in a leading journal.’ 36 This is based on the belief that output would be higher (and prices lower) under competition than under monopoly, which I showed to be false in Chapter 4. 37 a rule of thumb that asserts that the central bank can control inflation by increasing real interest rates roughly twice as much as any increase in inflation.

bicycle riding, learning of Big Bang theory Big Government Biggs, M. Black Swan events Blanchard, Olivier Blatt, John Blaug, Mark Bliley, Thomas J. Blinder, Alan Blodget, Henry Bohm, David Bose, Arun Brahe, Tycho de budget constraints budget deficits Buffet, Warren business cycle; in USA; real Butterfly Effect calculus; use of Cambridge controversies capacity; capacity utilization capital: as amorphous mass; circulating; definition of; different meanings of; fixed; measurement of; theory of capital assets pricing model (CAPM); failure of capitalism: as joint enterprise; demise of, imagined; monetary model of; response to disequilibrium; value as social system Carpenter, Seth, ‘Money, reserves, and the transmission of monetary policy’ ceteris paribus assumption chain reaction of depression chain rule chaos; concept of; exponential sensitivity of situations chaos theory Chiarella, Carl circuit of capital Clark, J.


pages: 455 words: 138,716

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, company town, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Edward Snowden, ending welfare as we know it, fake it until you make it, fixed income, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, information retrieval, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Michael Milken, naked short selling, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, social contagion, telemarketer, too big to fail, two and twenty, War on Poverty

He was also now expanding the possible collateral consequences to include a “ripple effect” that would impact the whole economy, including innocent victims not just within the target firm, but perhaps also in other firms as well. If we press charges, in other words, we just don’t know what might happen—to everybody! We were now officially in the realm of an Edward Lorenz “butterfly effect” theory of crime fighting: a single indictment might be felt all the way around the world, and forever. This interview startled even the most hardened observers of politics in Washington. Two U.S. senators, Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, were so appalled that they sent Holder a letter demanding an explanation for Breuer’s Frontline interview.

Holder during this Senate hearing did not mention that he had come up with this idea fourteen years earlier, long before too-big-to-fail was even imaginable. He went on. The problem comes, he said, “when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” This was a variation on Breuer’s “butterfly effect” interview. We just don’t know what will happen if we press charges, so … let’s not. It was a stunning series of admissions. Even Barron’s was appalled. “The nation’s chief law-enforcement official admitted the decision to prosecute depends not on the law, but the impact on the financial markets,” wrote columnist Randall Forsyth.


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Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Those events are mostly human actions, so history is a product of the way individual human actions come together to produce the future, however constrained by certain previous conditions, such as laws of nature, economic forces, demographic trends, and cultural mores. We are free, but not to do just anything. And the significance of a human action is also restricted by when in the historical sequence the action is taken. The earlier the action is in a sequence, the more sensitive the sequence is to minor changes—the so-called butterfly effect. The key to historical transcendence is that since you cannot know when in the sequence you are (since history is contiguous) and what effects present actions may have on future outcomes, positive change requires that you choose your actions wisely—all of them. What you do tomorrow could change the course of history, even if only long after you are gone.

Until these are taken into account, I cannot say exactly how much information can in fact be extracted from the past." The problem of the irrecoverable past is serious, since history is a conjuncture of events compelling a certain course of action by constraining prior events. History often turns on tiny contingencies, very few of which we know about. Given the sensitive dependence on initial conditions—the butterfly effect—how does Omega/God resurrect all the butterflies? This perception of history derails Drs. Tipler and Pangloss, as Voltaire noted at the end of Candide: Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "All events are linked up in this best of all possible worlds; for, if you had not been expelled from the noble castle by hard kicks in your backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been clapped into the Inquisition, if you had not wandered about America on foot, if you had not stuck your sword in the Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you would not be eating candied citrons and pistachios here......Tis well said," replied Candide, "but we must cultivate our gardens." (1985, p. 328) Namely, whatever the sequence of contingencies and necessities in our lives and in history, the outcome would have seemed equally inevitable.


Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

Before someone makes a joke about the tree probably being from the “Beyond” section, I have to warn you—the tree is also a bath! So it’s from the “Bath” section! There’s a hollow in the center that you can fill with hot water and carefully bathe one leg in at a time. It’s a fake tree, obviously, but I would still throw it away and buy a new one every year to get the full Christmas effect® (not to be confused with The Butterfly Effect® starring Ashton Kutcher®, a Jew®). Christmas ornaments are the part of Christmas that I find most confusing. Who needs Christmas ornaments when nature has provided her own ornaments: bird’s nests, Frisbees, and plums that I sometimes Scotch-tape onto non-plum trees for fun? Still, decorating the tree was pretty cool.


pages: 180 words: 55,805

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

The output of that inequality will lead to a negative feedback loop of more extremism. That tribe or group mentality will in turn give rise to leaders who, instead of uniting us, divide us further using simple “us versus them” narratives. They become believable, potentially generationally believable, with severe consequences for us all. A butterfly effect where seemingly small things gradually cascade into very big things. It has happened before and, if nothing is done, it will happen again. But, again, the Robbers Cave study gives us insight on how we might solve for these conflicts or prevent them in the first place. Can we challenge ourselves to create a better system for the world today by, instead of solving for an individual competition, finding a number of bigger goals that we must all solve for the benefit of humanity?


pages: 482 words: 147,281

A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asilomar, butterfly effect, California gold rush, content marketing, Easter island, Elisha Otis, Golden Gate Park, index card, indoor plumbing, lateral thinking, Loma Prieta earthquake, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, place-making, risk tolerance, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, supervolcano, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

It began with an immense earthquake in Iran; a series of shocks and volcanoes then shuddered all around the world for much of the twelve months following; and then the catastrophic Sumatran Tsunami struck precisely one year after it all began. Geologists looking at the statistics have lately started to wonder if some cruel butterfly effect might be at work – a pattern that might permit a ferocious event on one side of the planet to trigger a similar disaster far away on the other. Those who believe in the ideas of Gaia think this might be so: as the plates shifting against one another are all interconnected, jostlings on one part of the planet’s surface might well create sympathetic movements elsewhere.

Which brought me back to the premise with which this account began – the notion that this fragile planet, suspended in the blackness of space, is now something to be considered as an immense whole, with all of its elements interlinked and interconnected, the one happenstance triggering another and another and another, for as long as the world exists. The butterfly effect, written into the rocks of the American West, and into the rest of the world as well. One day the researcher who discovered the effects of Alaskan quakes on Yellowstone geysers took me to see Daisy: might it signal by its timing some event in the distant West? So I waited with him in the late-spring sunshine, looking at my wristwatch, gazing across from behind a pinewood palisade towards the yellow patch of sulphur on the ground, surrounded by pools of blue groundwater.


Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

Equally, asking someone with no experience or awareness of the technology market to make a judgement on how sensible it is to put out a tender for a five-year contract on cloud hosting or data centres is not a good idea. Creating new rules and standards allows you to scale practices across an organisation quickly. Putting the assessment of teams in the hands of qualified, multidisciplinary groups of specialists allows you to ensure those practices remain sound. The butterfly effect The biggest risk that comes with setting new rules is that they come to resemble what they were designed to replace. Setting new rules doesn’t stop inertia from being the defining characteristic of your big organisation; it merely nudges the direction of travel. Unless you keep them fit for purpose, your new rules can quickly turn into next year’s cumbersome processes.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

As if by magic, every single joke landed perfectly, the energy in the auditorium was electric, and I felt a better connection with the crowd (who, incidentally, were also pretty well-dressed themselves). I even managed to reunite Jordan with Ben Shapiro, who made a surprise guest appearance carrying a “gay” wedding cake for me. The crowd ate it up. Dressing as the person I wanted to be—the best, sharpest, funniest version of myself—did something on a cognitive level, which then had a butterfly effect on everything else that followed. Since then, I’ve made a concerted effort to improve my appearance and maximize the power it offers. Don’t get me wrong—on the weekends I’ve still got my favorite baseball hats, jeans, and sneakers for when I’m lounging around the house, but I’ve also added some sharp suits, quality shirts, and fitted jackets to the mix for when the situation, the audience, and the universe deserve it.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

Despite the limitations of the model of history used in Civilization, Meier believed in the game and what it can reveal: It reflects some fundamental truths about civilization, but it is not intended to be the final word on how civilizations work. I think it does a good job of showing how small turning points—you know, the butterfly effect—that small changes can take history off in completely different directions. We tend to take for granted that history kind of had to work out the way it did. But one of the lessons of Civilization, which I think is true, is that with a few little changes, things could have gone differently.14 The game therefore still provides a compelling, if partial, sandbox in which some of these dynamics can be explored.


Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical Fallacies (Academic Edition) by Bo Bennett

Black Swan, book value, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, side project, statistical model, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method

Argument from Hearsay (also known as: the telephone game, Chinese whispers, anecdotal evidence, anecdotal fallacy/volvo fallacy [form of]) Definition: Presenting the testimony of a source that is not an eye-witness to the event in question. It has been conclusively demonstrated that with each passing of information, via analog transmission, the message content changes. Each small change can and often does lead to much more significant changes, as in the butterfly effect in chaos theory. Hearsay is generally considered very weak evidence, if considered evidence at all. Especially when such evidence is unfalsifiable (not able to be proven false). Logical Form: Person 1 told me that he saw Y. Therefore, you must accept that Y is true. Example #1: Lolita: Bill stole the money from the company petty cash fund.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Alan Turing may have noticed this first: observing that the computer, like the universe, is best seen as a collection of states, and the state of the machine at any instant leads to the state at the next instant, and thus all the future of the machine should be predictable from its initial state and its input signals. The universe is computing its own destiny. Turing noticed that Laplace’s dream of perfection might be possible in a machine but not in the universe, because of a phenomenon which, a generation later, would be discovered by chaos theorists and named the butterfly effect. Turing described it this way in 1950: The system of the “universe as a whole” is such that quite small errors in initial conditions can have an overwhelming effect at a later time. The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centimetre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping.♦ If the universe is a computer, we may still struggle to access its memory.

., 6.1, 6.2 Berry’s paradox, 6.1, 6.2, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 Bible Bierce, Ambrose Bigelow, Julian binary operations coding systems for, 5.1, 5.2 representation of relay circuits as in telegraphy, 7.1, 8.1 in use of alphabetical ordering systems see also bit(s) biology entropy and, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 evolutionary, 10.1, 11.1 fundamental particles of of human ecosystem, 10.1, 10.2 information processing in, prl.1, prl.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 molecular, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 purposeful action in processes of, 9.1, 9.2 see also genetics; neurophysiology biosphere, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 bit(s) as basis of physics, prl.1, prl.2, 13.1, 13.2 biological measurements cost of information processing data compression strategies, 12.1, 12.2 decision-making requirements definition of, prl.1, 7.1 first usage growth of measuring units, 14.1, 14.2 meaning and measurement of cosmos in, prl.1, 14.1 purpose transmission by fire beacon, 1.1, 1.2 black holes, prl.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4 Blair, Ann Blair, Earl Bletchley Park, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1 Blount, Thomas, 3.1, 3.2 Bodleian Library, 3.1, 3.2, 6.1 Bohr, Niels, prl.1, 6.1, 13.1 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 9.1, 9.2 Bombe machine book burning Boole, George, prl.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 6.1, 6.2, 8.1, 8.2, 12.1 Borges, Jorge Luis, 14.1, 14.2, epl.1, epl.2 botanical dictionaries, 14.1, 14.2, 15.1 Bradley, Henry, 3.1, 3.2 Brahe, Tycho, 4.1, 15.1 brain; see neurophysiology Brassard, Gilles, 13.1, 13.2 “Breakdown of Physics in Gravitational Collapse, The” (Hawking) Brecht, Bertolt Breguet, Abraham-Louis, 5.1, 5.2 Brenner, Sydney, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 Brewster, David, 4.1, 8.1 Bridenbaugh, Carl, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3 Briggs, Henry, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 Brillouin, Léon, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 Brin, Sergey, 14.1, epl.1 Broadbent, Donald, 8.1, 8.2 Brosin, Henry Brown, Robert Browne, Thomas, 1.1, 1.2, 5.1 Brownian motion, 6.1, 6.2, 8.1 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom Buchanan, James Bullokar, John Burgess, Anthony Burney, Venetia Burton, Robert, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3 Bush, Vannevar, prl.1, prl.2, 5.1n, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 7.1 Butler, Samuel, 2.1, 10.1, 10.2 butterfly effect Byron, Augusta Ada; see Lovelace, Ada Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 4.1, 4.2 bytes Cage, John, 12.1, 12.2 Cairns-Smith, Alexander, 10.1, 10.2 calculators, calculating machines analog and digital Babbage’s Analytical Engine, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 4.9, 4.10, 4.11, 4.12, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1 Babbage’s Difference Engine, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 4.9, 4.10, 4.11, 4.12, 4.13, 4.14, 4.15, 4.16, 4.17, 4.18, 6.1 definition of “calculation,” 7.1 Differential Analyzer, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 in evolution of information technology, prl.1, 4.1 use of relay circuits in see also computation; computer(s); machines calculus, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, epl.1 Campbell, George, prl.1, prl.2 “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”


pages: 512 words: 162,977

New Market Wizards: Conversations With America's Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager

backtesting, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black-Scholes formula, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, currency risk, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, fixed income, full employment, implied volatility, interest rate swap, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, money market fund, paper trading, pattern recognition, placebo effect, prediction markets, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, the map is not the territory, transaction costs, uptick rule, War on Poverty

., systems that never exactly repeat themselves and hence never find a steady state, such as weather or the markets—slight differences in variable values or measurements can be magnified to have huge effects over increasing periods of time. The technical name for this phenomenon—sensitive dependence on initial conditions—has become better known as the Butterfly Effect. As James Gleick described it in his excellent book, Chaos: Making a New Science, “In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.”) There are too many unpredictable things that can happen within 300 / The New Market Wizard two months.


pages: 625 words: 167,349

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

“The first challenge,” Armstrong writes, “is, of course, to actually define low impact. Any action (or inaction) has repercussions that percolate through the future light-cone, changing things subtly but irreversibly. It is hard to capture the intuitive human idea of ‘a small change.’ ”41 Armstrong suggests that despite the possible “butterfly effects” of even seemingly trivial actions, we might nonetheless be able to distinguish totally world-changing events from safer ones. For instance, he says, we might develop an index of “twenty billion” or so metrics that describe the world—“the air pressure in Dhaka, the average night-time luminosity at the South Pole, the rotational speed of Io, and the closing numbers of the Shanghai stock exchange”42—and design an agent to be appropriately wary of any action that would perturb, say, a measurable fraction of them.

See transparency boat race scenario, 9–11, 302 Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess (Fischer), 162 BOGSAT method, 101 Boltzmann (ir)rationality, 323, 398n29 Bolukbasi, Tolga, 6–7, 9, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 316 Bonawitz, Elizabeth, 196 bootstrapping, 285 Borden, Brisha, 8 boredom, 188, 201, 202, 203–05, 373n62 Boston University, 6 Bostrom, Nick, 223, 246, 262, 309–10, 313 Bowling, Michael, 181 Box, George, 314 “Brain Function and Adaptive Systems: A Heterostatic Theory” (Klopf), 127 Braithwaite, Richard, 329 Breland, Keller, 154, 161, 364n8 Breland, Marian, 154, 161, 364n8 Brennan, Tim, 55–56, 60–61, 72, 73, 78, 80, 346n13 Brilliant, Ashleigh, 185 brittleness, 279–81, 387n8, 389n21 Brooks, Rodney, 326 Broome, John, 304, 305 Brown University, 158, 170 Bruce, Andrew, 52 Bryson, Joanna, 45, 397n19 Buolamwini, Joy, 30, 32–33, 342–43n68 Burda, Yuri, 199–200, 201, 206 Burgess, Ernest, 52–54, 55, 75, 76, 81 Bush, George W., 31 butterfly effects, 291–92 Bykvist, Krister, 305 C4.5, 99–100 Caldwell, Tommy, 220–21 calibration, 28–29, 61, 68, 70, 71–72 Caliskan, Aylin, 45 Cambridge Analytica, 67 Cambridge University, 140–41, 144 Caplan, Arthur, 290 Carlsen, Magnus, 240 Carnap, Rudolf, 2 Carnegie Mellon autonomous driving, 224–26, 228, 230–32, 377n39 inverse reinforcement learning, 260–61 medical predictive models, 82–83 risk-assessment models, 67 robotics, 223 uncertainty, 391n39 Carse, James, 372n49 CART, 99–100 Caruana, Rich, 82, 83, 84–85, 86–87, 106–07, 352nn10–12 cascading errors, 229–34, 322 Case Western University, 189–90, 370n26 Catholicism, 302–03, 304 causation, 352n8 CBOW (continuous bag-of-words), 341n54 Centre for Effective Altruism, 237–38, 309 CHA2DS2-VASc, 100–01 CHADS2, 100–01 Chang, Ruth, 131, 360–61n28 checkers, 126–27, 240–41, 242–43 check processing, 21–22 Chen, Richard, 369n9 Chentanez, Nuttapong, 370n12 chess actualism vs. possibilism and, 235 boredom and, 204–05 credit-assignment problem and, 133 Deep Blue, 205, 241–42 imitation and, 242–43 incentives and, 366–67n44 policy vs. value functions and, 137–38, 139 shaping and, 157, 162 value-based approaches and, 241–42 child development helping behavior in, 251–52, 382nn2–3 human-machine cooperation and, 269 imitation in, 214–16, 375nn7–8, 14, 17, 376n23 intrinsic motivation and, 189–90, 195–97, 198 Chouldechova, Alexandra, 67–68, 69, 74, 77, 80 Christiano, Paul on amplification, 248–49 on artificial general intelligence delay risks, 310 on corrigibility, 392–93n51 on feedback learning, 386n48 on human-machine cooperation, 273 on inverse reinforcement learning, 263–66, 384–85n37 Chrome, 347n33 CIFAR-10, 23 Ćirković, Milan, 262 CIRL.


pages: 208 words: 65,733

This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor - the Sunday Times Bestseller by Adam Kay

airport security, butterfly effect, Kinder Surprise, post-work, Skype

He asks if I’m free to come over; his flatmate Terry has injured himself and Lee suspects he may benefit from going to hospital, but would value my advice. It’s not far away and I’m not doing anything that can’t wait, so I pop over. Terry has indeed injured himself. From the most insignificant of actions can come the most serious of consequences – and we’ve gone full ‘butterfly effect’ here. He cut his thumb opening a humble can of beans, has severed a little artery that’s currently irrigating the floor and the top of his thumb is flapping open like a Muppet’s mouth. There’s even bone visible. I’m happy to provide my professional assessment that a visit to hospital is not just advised, but is both crucial and urgent.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

More complex systems (like weather, the stock market, or human culture) rely on a huge number of attractors and can be better thought of as “phase spaces.” In phase spaces, repetitions and differences lead to constantly shifting equilibriums. A minor change in the original condition can effect a hugely different outcome—better known as the “butterfly effect”—and can also create a different attractor, collapsing it into a fixed solution or tumbling it back into apparent chaos before a new strange attractor establishes itself. This effect is readily visible when you watch an animation of the strange attractor, many of which are now available on the World Wide Web.


Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature by Ben Mezrich

butterfly effect, CRISPR, Danny Hillis, double helix, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, General Motors Futurama, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, life extension, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, microbiome, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology

Ryan Phelan, Brand’s wife, still seated, her blond hair pulled up in a ponytail, exuded the intelligence and confidence of a serial entrepreneur; she’d sold at least two successful biotech start-ups in the past decade, and had her fingers in a couple more. Church did his best not to trip on the high steps leading up to the porch. Over the course of his career, he’d been blessed to meet many brilliant people, but true innovators like Brand and Phelan were few and far between. Their meeting had come about by way of a butterfly effect starting with that phone call from the journalist at the New York Times, asking questions about Woolly Mammoths. “It’s different, isn’t it?” Brand said, as he shook Church’s hand and then gestured at the house behind him. “Took quite an effort to get it set up. There’s about two thousand books in the library downstairs, and we added a whole second story for a guest bedroom.


Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Designing the Mind, Ryan A Bush

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive bias, cognitive load, correlation does not imply causation, data science, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, drug harm reduction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, impulse control, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, price anchoring, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, Walter Mischel

Anyone who has seen a film in which a protagonist’s most desired wishes are granted by a genie or David Bowie can tell you the problem with this confidence. Our tendency to reduce complex situations to oversimplified simulations plays out in our pursuit of happiness, where it gives us a false confidence in our prediction of wanted or unwanted outcomes. The butterfly effect states that there are certain systems which are so complex and sensitive to initial data that precise prediction of outcomes becomes impossible. This theory explains why our ability to predict the weather is still so mediocre despite our advancement in other areas. It has been said that “a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.”2 But this difficulty in complex prediction applies to our happiness as well, and the bias here is our tendency to vastly simplify the complexity of these real-world events.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Complex-systems researchers often cite simple nonlinear mathematical relationships that can generate tremendously complicated graphs, so complicated that a slight change in the starting point makes it impossible to predict where the graph will end up only a few steps later. The classic illustration of this kind of complexity is the “butterfly effect”—because weather is a complex system, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Beijing could be the cause of a hurricane in New Orleans several weeks later. By definition, complex systems are hard to understand and, therefore, hard to regulate. In the Adaptive Markets framework, complexity means we don’t have a good narrative for the system.

., 6, 263–264, 265, 397, 398 bonds, 259, 409; for biotechnology, 407; government, 242, 249–250, 292; index funds for, 265 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 322 Bonner, John, 371 bonobo, 162 bonuses, 303–305 Bossaerts, Peter, 101 bounded rationality, 36, 208, 215; Adaptive Markets Hypothesis likened to, 188; applications of, 185, 217; criticisms of, 181–182, 209, 213–214; informational limits acknowledged by, 34; optimization contrasted with, 180, 183 Boyle, Danny, 118 bracketology, 64–65 brain size, 152–53 brainstem, 81 Breiter, Hans, 88–89 Brennan, Tom, 182, 190, 196–197, 198, 203, 220, 362, 369 Brexit referendum, 377 Brodmann, Korbinian, 76 broker-dealers, 304–308, 311, 376 Bronze Age, 163 Brosnan, Sarah F., 337 Brownian motion, 19, 211 Buck v. Bell (1927), 171 Bucy, Paul, 78–79 Buffett, Warren, 6, 11, 225, 231, 234–235, 286, 301, 407 Burch, Robert L., 234 Burnham, Terry, 337–338 “butterfly effect,” 361 Caisse d’Epargne, 61 California Public Employees’ Retirement System, 409 Camping, Harold, 342 Canada, 242 cancer, 400–410 Candide (Voltaire), 139 candlestick charting, 17, 23 cap-and-trade system, 416 Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), 27, 212, 249, 251–252, 263, 267, 282 capital requirements, 62, 306–308, 311, 368 capitalism, 7, 89, 412 carbon tax, 416 Cardano, Girolamo, 17, 21, 27 Carlsson, Arvid, 88 Carnegie Mellon University, 33–34, 172, 178, 181 Carroll, Lewis, 322 Carter, Jimmy, 401 Carville, James, 9–10 Case, Karl, 314 Case-Shiller Index, 314 Caspi, Avshalom, 160 cause and effect, 128 Caves, Dick, 127 Cayne, Jimmy, 304, 305 cell phones, 246–248 Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC), 216 Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP), 254 central banks, 230, 291, 301, 368, 391 Ceradase, 419 Cerezyme, 419 Challenger (space shuttle), 12–16, 24, 38 Chan, Nicholas, 41, 317 chaos theory, 278 Chen, Jiulin, 61 chess, 112, 131, 179 Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), 270, 356–358 Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), 360, 368–369, 370 Chicago School, 25 Chicxulub meteor, 241–242 chief risk officers (CROs), 392 chimpanzee, 150, 153, 337 China, 258, 409–410, 411, 412 China Aviation Oil, 61 Citigroup, 318–319 Clark, Luke, 91 climate change, 364, 416 Clinton, Bill, 10, 85 cobweb theorem, 31, 33, 34, 109 Coca Cola, 284–285, 384 cocaine, 89, 90, 91 Coffee, John C., 309–310 Cohn, Alain, 352–353 Cold War, 52 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), 298, 299, 343 Collier, Paul, 412 Colossal Failure of Common Sense, A (McDonald and Robinson), 317–318 commercial banks, 293, 301, 308, 335, 371 commodities trading, 20, 34 Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), 359, 360, 377 common law, 372 competition, 3, 153, 168, 214, 217 complexity, 217, 278, 361–364, 372, 374 computational biochemistry, 240 computerized axial tomography (CAT), 78, 102 confirmation bias, 305–306 confounding variables, 139 congenital analgesia, 378 Congo Free State, 412 consilience, 215 Consolidated Supervised Entities, 306 contrarian strategy, 290, 316, 325 controlled experiments, 47, 139 Cook, William, 236 cooperation, 164–165, 168, 214, 336, 340 Coppersmith, Don, 239 core, in networks, 374–376 corn, 28–29, 30 corpus callosum, 113–114 Cortana, 396 cortex, 81, 130; anterior cingulate, 86, 105; prefrontal, see prefrontal cortex cortisol, 81 Cosmides, Leda, 173, 174 cost-benefit analysis, 104, 119, 121–122, 169, 316 Cost Matters Hypothesis, 265, 397 Cotzias, George, 88 Countrywide Financial, 325 coupling, 321–322, 361, 372–374 creative destruction, 219 credit default swaps (CDSs), 298, 300, 379, 407 credit rating agencies, 301 Crick, Francis, 137, 144, 401 Cronqvist, Henrik, 161 crowded trades, 291–292, 293 crowdfunding, 356 cryptography, 238–239, 385 currency trading, 12–16, 24, 38 D.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

But in a structural crisis, the fluctuations are wide and constant, and the system is ever further from equilibrium. This is the definition of a structural crisis. It follows that however radical are “revolutions,” during “normal” times their effect is limited. In contrast, during a structural crisis, small social mobilizations have very great effects. This is the so-called butterfly effect, when free will prevails over determinism. The second politically significant characteristic of a structural crisis is that neither alternative “spirit” can be organized such that a small group can fully determine its actions. There are multiple players, representing different interests, believing in different short-run tactics, and coordination among them is difficult to achieve.


pages: 202 words: 72,857

The Wealth Dragon Way: The Why, the When and the How to Become Infinitely Wealthy by John Lee

8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, butterfly effect, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Donald Trump, financial independence, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Maslow's hierarchy, multilevel marketing, negative equity, passive income, payday loans, reality distortion field, self-driving car, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

If you are going to be financially successful, you have to read what financially successful people are reading and read about what they are doing. Action creates attraction. Like the ripples that occur in a pond when you throw a stone into it and break the clear surface, every action you take has a butterfly effect. The little waves we make when we take action create ripples in the universe and we attract back to us the results of those actions. Watch the ripples on the pond after you've thrown in a stone. At first it seems as if they are only moving outwards, but if you look carefully you'll see miniature circular waves being cast back to the centre.


pages: 232 words: 78,701

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual by Luvvie Ajayi

affirmative action, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, clean water, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Skype, Snapchat, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, upwardly mobile

Robbing a place of its resources and pilfering the land dry can get tiring after a couple of centuries, so when colonialists decided to be done with wherever they had conquered, they left behind political, socioeconomic, and class-structure issues that rendered countries in shambles. In their wake they left deadly civil wars stemming from forcing clans and ethnic groups with major differences under the same umbrella. But when shit hits the fan and problems develop from the legacy of colonialism—like a butterfly effect, if the butterfly was really an elephant that flipped tables and ruined everything—then the colonizers want to say it’s not their business. They want to play Captain Save-a-Hoe when it comes to pilfering the land of its wealth, but when it’s time to offer the countries on the continent actual aid, they come up missing like we do when Sallie Mae calls asking about our student loan payments.


pages: 328 words: 77,877

API Marketplace Engineering: Design, Build, and Run a Platform for External Developers by Rennay Dorasamy

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, continuous integration, DevOps, digital divide, disintermediation, fault tolerance, if you build it, they will come, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, Lyft, market fragmentation, microservices, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, optical character recognition, platform as a service, pull request, ride hailing / ride sharing, speech recognition, the payments system, transaction costs, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, web application

What continually amazes me is the symbiotic nature of the ecosystem. The API Marketplace will not exist without consumers and the support from enterprise services. Yet, it is a pivotal component for external consumers to leverage the capability of the enterprise services. A ripple effect, which we hope will one day turn into a butterfly effect, is that the Marketplace has stimulated the local developer community. As a leading Financial Services provider, the capability provided by our Marketplace has enabled the building of many innovative products and services. These new shoots of growth need to be nurtured and supported and will result in successful third parties who will further fuel the Marketplace.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

You could produce a transport solution that is both objectively better and cheaper than the alternatives and still find it gets overused or underused by people who do not gain the most they could from it. No one is claiming that behavioural science is an exact science and no one should claim it is a silver bullet, but it does present the transport planner with a much wider space in which to engage – and a space that is more valuable because it allows for butterfly effects: cases in which very small and inexpensive changes can lead to extremely valuable results. The choice between two road improvement plans that we discussed at the start of this part of the book illustrated the proportion heuristic, but the results revealed something bigger. Even our basic perception of the physical world – in this case, the relationship between speed increases and time savings – uses mental models that give approximations.


pages: 345 words: 86,394

Frequently Asked Questions in Quantitative Finance by Paul Wilmott

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discrete time, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, fudge factor, implied volatility, incomplete markets, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, iterative process, lateral thinking, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, martingale, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, risk free rate, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, urban planning, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Given enough data, and a big enough brain, we can write down some equations or an algorithm for predicting the future. Interestingly, the subjects of dynamical systems and chaos fall into this category. And, as you know, chaotic systems show such sensitivity to initial conditions that predictability is in practice impossible. This is the ‘butterfly effect,’ that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil will ‘cause’ rainfall over Manchester. (And what doesn’t!) A topic popular in the early 1990s, this has not lived up to its promises in the financial world. Discrete/Continuous: Whether probabilistic or deterministic the eventual model you write down can be discrete or continuous.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Even when vehicle usage is at its peak, fewer than 12 percent of all personal vehicles are on the road, which means, of course, that 88 percent are not in use.[35] Gaming Traffic Trying to outsmart traffic is almost a pastime for many commuters but numerous studies have shown that congestion is a delicate balance - not too far removed from “the butterfly effect” - a small change can have much greater knock-on consequences that would first seem logical. But that is due to the small margins, with many major routes operating perilously close to capacity at peak times. Canceling the trips of 1 percent of drivers from carefully selected neighborhoods would reduce the extra travel time for all other drivers in a metropolitan area by as much as 18 percent.[36] A 2009 Japanese study found that a 2–5% reduction in peak-hour traffic volumes has been shown to lead to a 27%-35% reduction in total traffic delay.[37] Traffic simulations of the city of Berlin[38] suggest that at around 20 per-cent of vehicles fitted with traffic-aware navigation, everyone’s journey times might be cut by up to 30 per-cent.


pages: 267 words: 81,144

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

butterfly effect, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, rolodex, sharing economy, Skype, TED Talk

You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you up until that last slurp of that cup of tea you just put down. How your parents hugged you, that thing your first boyfriend once said about your thighs – these are all bricks that have been laid from the soles of your feet up. Your eccentricities, foibles and fuck-ups are a butterfly effect of things you saw on telly, things teachers said to you and the way people have looked at you since the first moment you opened your eyes. Being a detective for your past – tracing back through all of it to get to the source with the help of a professional – can be incredibly useful and freeing. 7.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

And when that market crashed, it took the world economy with it and, in due course, triggered a wave of populism. Without credit default swaps, there might never have been a President Donald Trump. And in the case of this pandemic, we now all recognize how a tiny viral particle, circulating in a bat in China’s Hubei Province, has brought the world to its knees—a real-life example of the butterfly effect, whereby the flapping of a butterfly’s wing might influence weather patterns on the other side of the world. Small changes can have big consequences. In power grids or computer networks, if one tiny element breaks and then shifts its load to another, which then breaks, it can produce a chain reaction that grows ever larger, like a ripple that becomes a roaring wave.


pages: 266 words: 80,273

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

The important thing to know about complex systems is that they behave very differently from the linear, mechanical systems we are more familiar with, where if you put something in one end, you get a predictable response out the other. In a complex system, if you change one bit, you might get a completely disproportionate response you were not predicting, because you don’t know the states of all the components at that precise moment or how they all affect each other. The famous butterfly effect, where the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas, reflects early efforts to model the weather, a complex system where tiny differences in starting conditions can create huge differences in outcome. These are called nonlinear effects. This happens in all complex systems.


pages: 259 words: 84,261

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Quantum computers will also be capable of processing massive amounts of data in parallel so they can help us do incredibly complex calculations, such as those needed for weather forecasting, much more accurately than we can today. They would be able to predict hurricanes way ahead of time and maybe even suggest the actions needed to create butterfly effects that dissolve a natural disaster before its inception. They could be our rainmakers. Equally, they could, and likely will, become the eye in the sky, watching every move of every human and taking actions to prevent us from committing crimes we have not even considered committing yet. Most importantly, such enormous processing power will advance the development of artificial intelligence at a rate that will eclipse human intelligence the minute it becomes available.


pages: 824 words: 218,333

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

Nor do we know whether making a directed change in one gene might cause the entire genome to become dysregulated. If some genes are indeed “recipes,” as in Dawkins’s formulation, then altering one gene may cause far-reaching consequences for gene regulation—potentially unleashing a volley of downstream consequences, akin to the proverbial butterfly effect. If such butterfly-effect genes are common in the genome, then they will represent fundamental limitations for gene-editing technologies. The discontinuity of genes—the discreteness and autonomy of each individual unit of heredity—will turn out to be an illusion: genes may yet be more interconnected than we think.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Cleaving all information is the great divide between creativity and determinism, between information entropy of surprise and thermodynamic entropy of predictable decline, between stories that capture a particular truth and statistics that reveal a sterile generality, between cryptographic hashes that preserve information and mathematical blends that dissolve it, between the butterfly effect and the law of averages, between genetics and the law of large numbers, between singularities and big data—in a word, the impassible gulf between consciousness and machines. Not only was a new science born but also a new economy, based on a new system of the world—the information theory articulated in 1948 by Shannon on the foundations first launched in a room in Königsberg in September 1930.


pages: 265 words: 93,354

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays by Phoebe Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, defund the police, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joan Didion, Lyft, mass incarceration, microaggression, off-the-grid, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois

Well, until recently, my boyfriend was that heaux. He’d get excited at this query and chat away; meanwhile, the innocent person listening to him probably thought, I know that if I could go back in time and not ask this man how he was doing, I’d risk bringing about catastrophic consequences as a result of this butterfly effect, but flap dem wings, boo, and get me out this conversation! Anyway, the person and Bae would finish talking, and he would be slightly confused. I’d go, “Hun, just say you’re good and keep it moving. No one has time for your pip-pip, tallyho cheeriness.” But let’s be real. Most people don’t actually really care how you’re doing, especially in New York.


pages: 396 words: 96,049

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

bioinformatics, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deepfake, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hyperloop, independent contractor, job automation, low earth orbit, messenger bag, mirror neurons, off grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, ride hailing / ride sharing, supervolcano, time dilation

Just as I’d expected, the same genes that had been altered in my genome had also been altered correspondingly in hers. Even the modifications tracked. These DNA payloads were already beginning to exercise their edits to myriad genes, involving multiple cascades of pathways—each a light touch to the genome, almost a butterfly effect that would have, over time, changed Tiffany’s genome and led to augmentation of her intelligence, longevity, and resilience, finally lifting her to some version of my level of being. After seeing Kara and Andrew, I was beginning to suspect that, while the upgrade altered expressions of intelligence, memory, and physical prowess across the board, it could exponentially ramp up preexisting proclivities—strength, agility, and coordination for people like Andrew and Kara.


pages: 297 words: 98,506

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales

business climate, butterfly effect, complexity theory, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, impulse control, Lao Tzu, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, power law, systems thinking

But the harder you drive the system, the more iterations result and the more unpredictable it becomes. Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT, was modeling weather systems on a computer in the early 1960s when he accidentally discovered that a tiny change in the initial state (1 part in 1,000) was enough to produce totally different weather patterns. That became known as the Butterfly Effect, “the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York,” as Gleick wrote in Chaos. Classical science aimed at predicting an outcome, then conducting an experiment to confirm it. But natural systems don’t behave so neatly. The specific details can be described, yet no one can predict the outcome.


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

As for China, du Plessis had little doubt that its long-term growth rate remained in place, “keeping China firmly in position as the world’s primary engine of growth.”17 This is the human element of the Earth wars, but there is a natural element at play as well. In classic chaos theory, tiny differences at the start of a sequence of events lead to vastly different outcomes—the so-called butterfly effect popularised by the U.S. mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in his work on computerised weather prediction in the 1960s. Lorenz, a professor emeritus at Massachusetts University of Technology (MIT) when he died in 2008 at the age of 90, wrote a paper in 1972 titled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Today, scholars in many different fields seem to be converging on similar answers to the question of what makes us different. When you see sudden, rapid changes like this, start looking for tiny changes that have huge consequences. Complexity theory and the related field of chaos theory are full of changes like this. Often, they are described as butterfly effects. The metaphor comes from the meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who pointed out that in weather systems, tiny events (the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, perhaps?) can get amplified by positive feedback cycles, generating a cascade of changes that may unleash tornadoes thousands of miles away. So what tiny changes unleashed the tornado of human history?


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors—a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.15 Cumulative advantage undoubtedly plays out in the actual market as well.


pages: 311 words: 94,732

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, Drosophila, epigenetics, Extropian, financial engineering, Future Shock, gravity well, greed is good, haute couture, heat death of the universe, hive mind, margin call, mirror neurons, negative equity, phenotype, plutocrats, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, telepresence, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing

Every time I take any action, it ripples out to all the people who are affected by it, and all the people they effect. You’re saying that sensitivity to initial conditions means that you’re morally obliged never to change your mind. It’s rubbish. Just because causality runs backwards in this place doesn’t mean the butterfly effect becomes the first commandment. Now, what did I promise 639,219 before we arbed?” Bonnie and the djinni are both talking now, but Huw has literally tuned them out, so that they’ve faded out of her causal universe, unable to affect her. She’s really getting to like this capabilities wheeze. She tunes them back in.


pages: 335 words: 98,847

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins

Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans

Twenty refugees from HMP Birmingham arrive in Wandsworth a few days later, and I hear some colourful accounts of the recent carnage. Apparently trouble initially flared because they’d had cold showers for three days. Connor is unsympathetic. ‘Fucking lightweights. Our showers have been freezing for two weeks.’ The butterfly effect Events in one prison often had consequences elsewhere in the system. The Birmingham riot had a surreal impact on Wandsworth, and I was soon awoken at 3 a.m. by a screw shining a torch in my face. ‘Morning, Chris. There’s a right fruit loop on G Wing; he tried to stab an officer earlier. Do you want to talk to him?’


pages: 412 words: 97,696

Bad Actors by Mick Herron

butterfly effect, fake news, Kickstarter, place-making, social distancing

“But that garden gnome that makes his decisions for him seems pretty keen on taking back control. And that would involve sidelining Taverner, yeah.” “I didn’t realise you kept track of the Westminster bubble.” He put a hand down his trousers again. When it reappeared, it was holding another cigarette. “Only in case it causes me grief. Like that butterfly effect. Some arsehole flaps his wings in SW1, next thing you know there’s a storm in my teacup. Speaking of which.” He reached for the mug on his desk, and tossed it at her. About half an ounce of cold tea containing at least two cigarette ends scattered around the room, much of it spattering Catherine’s dress.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

In December of 2009, Sornette presented the latest results of his research at the Financial Crisis Observatory in a talk to the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Fittingly, it was the annual Ed Lorenz Lecture given in honor of the pioneer of chaos theory and nonlinear geophysics. Lorenz became famous in the 1960s for his description of the butterfly effect in which the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can (theoretically) conjur a tornado in Texas. Sornette began with an attack on his nemesis: the Black Swan. “This is the evidence… that crises are not Black Swans, as my friend Nassim Taleb describes in his famous book, which is now a paradigmatic representation of financial crises.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

That’s like stairs, not a ramp. Even if we thoroughly understood the mechanism for an abrupt climate shift—likely a rearrangement of the winds that produce Deluge ’n’ Drought by delivering ocean moisture elsewhere, though burning down the Amazon rain forest should also trigger a big one—chaos theory’s butterfly effect says we still could not predict when a big shift will occur or what size it will be. That makes a climate surprise like a heart attack. You can’t predict when. You can’t say whether it will be minor or catastrophic. But you can often prevent it—in the case of climate, by cleaning up the excess CO2.


pages: 383 words: 108,266

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

air freight, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, computer vision, corporate governance, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, endowment effect, financial innovation, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, IKEA effect, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, lake wobegon effect, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Murray Gell-Mann, payday loans, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Upton Sinclair

What started as subprime mortgage loans to people with relatively bad credit ended up sucking the wealth out of the entire economy, and bringing almost every economic activity—from car loans to retail spending—to a near-halt. Even people with hefty retirement portfolios took a big hit. In the end, the economy is a complex dynamic system, a bit like the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory where events that happen to a small group of individuals (such as subprime borrowers) can have large and frightening effects down the road for everyone else. WHAT CAN WE, as individuals, do to overcome the challenges posed by the financial planning fallacy? First, of course, everyone needs to save more for a rainy day* and realize that rainy days are more common than we expect.


pages: 460 words: 107,712

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along. Similar mileage is made of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (‘Aren’t we all, in a very real sense, uncertain?’), Fuzzy Logic (‘Yes, it’s OK for you to be fuzzy too’), Chaos and Complexity Theory (the butterfly effect, the platonic, hidden beauty of the Mandelbrot Set – you name it, somebody has mysticized it and turned it into dollars). You can buy any number of books on ‘quantum healing’, not to mention quantum psychology, quantum responsibility, quantum morality, quantum aesthetics, quantum immortality and quantum theology.


pages: 477 words: 106,069

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Douglas Hofstadter, feminist movement, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, index card, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, lolcat, McMansion, meta-analysis, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, profit maximization, quantitative easing, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, short selling, Steven Pinker, the market place, theory of mind, Turing machine

Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes available, and it’s good to remember that each of them was a neologism in its day. The new entries in AHD 5 are a showcase for the linguistic exuberance and recent cultural history of the Anglosphere: Abrahamic, air rage, amuse-bouche, backward-compatible, brain freeze, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, camel toe, community policing, crowdsourcing, Disneyfication, dispensationalism, dream catcher, earbud, emo, encephalization, farklempt, fashionista, fast-twitch, Goldilocks zone, grayscale, Grinch, hall of mirrors, hat hair, heterochrony, infographics, interoperable, Islamofascism, jelly sandal, jiggy, judicial activism, ka-ching, kegger, kerfuffle, leet, liminal, lipstick lesbian, manboob, McMansion, metabolic syndrome, nanobot, neuroethics, nonperforming, off the grid, Onesie, overdiagnosis, parkour, patriline, phish, quantum entanglement, queer theory, quilling, race-bait, recursive, rope-a-dope, scattergram, semifreddo, sexting, tag-team, time-suck, tranche, ubuntu, unfunny, universal Turing machine, vacuum energy, velociraptor, vocal percussion, waterboard, webmistress, wetware, Xanax, xenoestrogen, x-ray fish, yadda yadda yadda, yellow dog, yutz, Zelig, zettabyte, zipline If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary.


pages: 480 words: 112,463

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gravity well, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, out of africa, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spinning jenny, synthetic biology, TED Talk, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic, Works Progress Administration

When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they recognised they were naked and immediately tried to fashion clothes out of fig leaves. Our clothes and home furnishing now allow us to survive all kinds of inhospitable climates (even outer space) and act like avatars of our identities and aspirations. The fabrics we choose and where we get them from still have butterfly-effect consequences on the lives of the people who make them and on the world around us. Perhaps it is time to stop being like early Egyptologists, eagerly tearing through mummies’ linen coverings to grab at the treasures they might contain, and instead aspire to the care and craft of the ancient Egyptians themselves.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

In his vision, government creates jobs by being the ‘employer of last resort' and underwrites distressed financial operators' balance sheets by being the ‘lender of last resort'.28 When the financial sector is so interconnected, it is very possible for one bank's failure to become contagious, leading to the bankruptcy of banks all over the world. In order to avoid this ‘butterfly effect', Minsky favoured strong regulation of financial intermediaries. In this he followed his mentor Keynes, who, as the post-war international order was being devised at Bretton Woods in 1944, advocated ‘the restoration of international loans and credit for legitimate purposes', while stressing the necessity of ‘controlling short-term speculative movements or flights of currency whether out of debtor countries or from one creditor country to another'.29 According to Keynes and Minsky, the possibility of financial crisis was always present in the way that money circulated - not as a means of exchange, but as an end in itself (an idea based predominantly on Marx's thinking).


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

To hear how some of this turned out, keep reading the next chapter. Notes 1. One of those numerical meteorology problems led to the discovery of deterministic chaos, the strong dependence of a result on what was presumed to be meaninglessly small differences in the inputs. This was popularized as the so-called butterfly effect, A Little AI Goes a Long Way on Wall Str eet 179 since the seemingly insignificant pressure changes caused by a fluttering butterfly, well within the limits of error of barometers used to measure them, could result in wildly different simulated future weather and climate outcomes. James Gleick’s book, Chaos (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), is the place to start for the story of chaos. 2.


Fix Your Gut: The Definitive Guide to Digestive Disorders by John Brisson

23andMe, big-box store, biofilm, butterfly effect, clean water, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, meta-analysis, microbiome, pattern recognition, publication bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Zimmermann PGP

Although I do not completely agree with Dr. Wallach’s entire body of work, I appreciate the fact that he encourages us to think about nutrition and the human body in different non-conventional ways. Discovering his work inspired me to dig deeper into natural health studies that served me well when I fell ill. Ever hear of the “butterfly effect?” According to Edward Lorenz, it is theoretically possible for a butterfly to flap its wings and create a puff of air that will eventually cause a tornado somewhere. Looking back, I can point to a single cause to the deterioration of my health for years to come, but instead of a butterfly, it was a blood pressure cuff.


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993, p. 134. 84 E.N. Lorenz, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 1963; 20: 130–141. 85 E.N. Lorenz, “The Predictability of Hydrodynamic Flow,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 1963; 25: 409–432. 86 E.N. Lorenz, “The Butterfly Effect,” Premio Felice Pietro Chisesi e Caterina Tomassoni Acceptance Speech, April, 2008. 2. An Old Enemy Returns 1 M.S. Asher, Dancing in the Wonder for 102 Years, Seattle: Amazon, 2015, p. 7. 2 P. Dvorak, “At 107, This Artist Just Beat COVID-19. It Was the Second Pandemic She Survived,” Washington Post, May 7, 2020; B.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

John Boyd, Organic Design for Command and Control, May 1987, p.16, available at http://www.ausairpower.net/JRB/organic_design.pdf. 11. The theory was popularized by Edward Lorenz, a diligent meteorologist who discovered the “butterfly effect” while searching for a way to produce more accurate weather predictions. Minuscule changes in his initial input to mathematical calculations for weather predictions could have extraordinary and unpredictable effects on the outcomes. The butterfly effect comes from a 1972 paper by Lorenz to the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”


pages: 643 words: 131,673

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

For your safety, and the safety of those around you, multiple biofilters installed throughout the FC3000™ work to ensure that your appearance in the past will not obliterate all human life with the introduction of dozens of deadly plagues and pestilences in a single instant. Figure 1: The FC3000™. All other features of the FC3000™ depicted above are self-explanatory. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS BY NEW TIME TRAVELERS Q: Will traveling to the past destroy the present, due to the “butterfly effect,” which they made several movies about (2004, 2025, 2034, etc.)? A: No. Those films were based on a speculative understanding of time travel that, thankfully, is not accurate. In reality, any temporal machinery—including the state-of-the-art FC3000™ rental-market time machine—creates a new “timeline,” or sequence of events, with each trip back in time.


pages: 470 words: 144,455

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier

Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, business process, butterfly effect, cashless society, Columbine, defense in depth, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, fault tolerance, game design, IFF: identification friend or foe, information security, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, macro virus, Mary Meeker, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Morris worm, Multics, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, pez dispenser, pirate software, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, slashdot, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, systems thinking, the payments system, Timothy McVeigh, Y2K, Yogi Berra

But increased modularity means increased security flaws, because security often fails where two modules interact. The third reason is the interconnectedness of complex systems. Distributed and networked systems are inherently risky. Complexity leads to the coupling of systems, which can lead to butterfly effects (minor problems getting out of hand). We’ve already seen examples of this as everything becomes Internet-aware. For years we knew that Internet applications like sendmail and rlogin had to be secure, but the recent epidemic of macro viruses shows that Microsoft Word and Excel need to be secure.


pages: 736 words: 147,021

Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety by Marion Nestle

Asilomar, biofilm, butterfly effect, clean water, confounding variable, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, illegal immigration, out of africa, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, software patent, Upton Sinclair

Guardian (London), November 1, 1999, at www.guardian.co.uk/science/1999/nov/01/gm.food. See: Correspondence: GM food debate. Lancet 1999;354:1725–1729. En-serink M. The Lancet scolded over Pusztai paper. Science 1999;286:656. 52. Losey JE, Rayor LS, Carter ME. Transgenic pollen harms monarch larvae. Nature 1999;399:214. 53. Stix G. The butterfly effect: new research findings and European jitters could cloud the future for genetically modified crops. Scientific American, August 1999:28–29. The finding inspired a book: Jack A. Imagine a World without Monarch Butterflies: Awakening to the Hazards of Genetically Altered Foods. Becket, MA: One Peaceful World Press, 1999.


pages: 493 words: 172,533

The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson by Kim Stanley Robinson

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, Murano, Venice glass, power law, Richard Feynman

In 1990 Japan started its African Assistance League. The Hiroshima Peace Party had a billion members. And so on; so that by July 29th, 2045, no human on Earth was the same as those who would have lived if the nomad in Kirgiz had not stepped on the butterfly a century before. This phenomenon is known as the butterfly effect, and it is a serious problem for all other models of historical explanation; meaning trouble for you and for me. The scientific term for it is “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” It is an aspect of chaos theory first studied by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who, while running computer simulations of weather patterns, discovered that the slightest change in the initial conditions of the simulation would quickly lead to completely different weather.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

“There was something really special, and I think we may not have all realized it at the time,” one member of the product team said. “But now, when I go into teams, I’m just looking for what is that magic that we saw in the early days of PayPal. And it’s rare, but it’s what we keep searching for.” One employee remarked on PayPal’s butterfly effect—not just in the achievements of people like Musk, Levchin, and Hoffman, whose creations have touched millions, but in the lives of the hundreds present at the creation. “It is… something that defines me and my life, and probably will for my entire life,” he said. Understanding the PayPal years helps shed light on a remarkable period in technological history and the remarkable people who brought it into being.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

Pritchett (Lagos: Macmillan Nigeria, 1978), 1–22. 11Carney and Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery, 123–4. 12Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 1–9 and 45–59. 13Ogborn, ‘Talking Plants’, 255–71, Kathleen Murphy, ‘Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly 70 (2013), and NHM, ‘Slavery and the Natural World, Chapter 7: Fevers’, accessed 15 October 2019, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/content/dam/nhmwww/discover/slavery-natural-world/chapter-7-fevers.pdf. 14Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves, 90, Ogborn, ‘Talking Plants’, 275, and Kwasi Konadu, Indigenous Medicine and Knowledge in African Society (London: Routledge, 2007), 85–9. 15Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 1–35, NHM, ‘Slavery and the Natural World, Chapter 2: People and Slavery’, and Julie Hochstrasser, ‘The Butterfly Effect: Embodied Cognition and Perceptual Knowledge in Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium’, in The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks, eds. Siegfried Huigen, Jan de Jong, and Elmer Kolfin (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 59–60. 16Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves, 12, NHM, ‘Slavery and the Natural World, Chapter 6: Resistance’, accessed 15 October 2019, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/content/dam/nhmwww/discover/slavery-natural-world/chapter-6-resistance.pdf, and Susan Scott Parrish, ‘Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge’, in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, eds.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Moreover, if you think the number of error messages and application crashes we face today are a problem, just wait until the Web is embedded in everything from your car to your sneakers to your microwave. Having to reboot your refrigerator, your thermostat, and your garage door in order to get them to run won’t be much fun either. If ever there were a technology that embodied the butterfly effect, it is surely the Internet of Things. In this world, it is impossible to know the consequences of connecting your home’s networked blender to the same information grid as an ambulance in Tokyo, a bridge in Sydney, or a Detroit auto manufacturer’s production line, and yet it will all be connected in one way or another.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Harvard University occupies a singular place in the public’s imagination, but Harvard Business School—the child reluctantly adopted by the parent early in the last century—eclipsed its parent in terms of its influence on society long ago. Given its position in the business firmament, anything that happens at HBS (changes in curriculum, in student career choices, in the methods of socialization of its students) has butterfly effects not just in the U.S. economy but globally. The direction they’re all pointed in—as well as the priorities they come to possess—has ramifications for every one of us. Before addressing those questions, however, it seems appropriate to dispense with an easy one, the cost-versus-value of a Harvard MBA.


pages: 1,006 words: 243,928

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, Burning Man, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Kickstarter, Lyft, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, remote working, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, trade route, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Portland-born Matt Groening created the hit cartoon show The Simpsons (1989–), which has many references to Portland’s streets. TV series recently filming in Portland include Portlandia (2011–) and Grimm (2011–2017). British Columbia is one of the centers of film in Canada, and Vancouver is a hot spot. Past movies and TV series shot in BC include The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016 and 2018), Roxanne (1987), The Butterfly Effect (2004) and An Unfinished Life (2005). Best Film Festivals Portland International Film Festival, February Seattle International Film Festival, May–June Vancouver International Film Festival, September–October Northwest Film Makers’ Festival (Portland), November Pacific Northwest by the Book Many great writers have either grown up in the Pacific Northwest or now call this region home.