Professor Elam

4/28/2025

I often comment in class that the decisions you make or do not make in the next two years will affect the rest of your life.

The Butterfly Effect refers to Chaos Theory.

Chaos Theory refers to the idea that one small change in events can generate much larger changes in society or your life. The link to the video makes this clear.

BBC explanation of Chaos Theory

Samuel Won TED talk on Chaos Theory

Some of these examples are too simplistic. Several speakers suggest that if Hitler had been taken out, killed, WW II might not have happened.

Well, the speakers also admit that such an event creates an alternate time line.

Social Mood theory notes that Hitler came to power at the very bottom of the world wide depression of 1932. Negative mood propelled a negative figure. Staggering from the Treaty of Versailles penalties, Germany had gone bankrupt. Had Hitler not emerged it seems likely someone else would have.

A better example may be Robert Frost poem, Two Paths Diverged Into the Wood.

For want of a nail, the horse shoe was lost.

Here is my own example, or rather a small part. I became an adjunct lecturer at UTPB int the early 1990s. One of the Professors got the job as Dept Chair at SW Texas, aka Texas State.

The oil price collapsed to $12 in 1998 and I cast around for a job. I called that Professor, he called back int three months and I got the lecture job.

My office was next to Roselyn Morris. She later became an  Asst Dean and attended a week long seminar at College Station. there she learned of A & M SA and recommended I apply

Had it not bee for her I would not have known of this. As it turns out with one week before school began SA A & M lacked an accounting teacher. And here I am.

A similar theory is the Black Swan Theory

The reinterpreted theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, starting in 2001, to explain:

1. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
2. The non-computability of the probability of consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
3. The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to the substantial role of rare events in historical affairs.

Taleb's "black swan theory" (which differs from the earlier philosophical versions of the problem) refers only to statistically unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.^[2]: xxi More technically, in the scientific monograph "Silent Risk",^[3] Taleb mathematically defines the black swan problem as "stemming from the use of degenerate metaprobability".^[3]