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Contemplations on Cascades
Connecting the snowball, domino, and butterfly effect together and leveraging these ideas in your life
What do chinese whispers, copycat crimes, and unexpectedly slow internet have in common?
We’ve had several names for it: snowball effect, butterfly effect, and domino effect. But, they are all examples of cascades.
When you know them separately, you know three different ideas. When you understand how they occur, you create a mental model. You understand the pattern.
For example, kids want the same toy other kids want, and parents want their kids to become either doctors or engineers. Both are the same idea: Our desires are shaped by others. That’s Mimetic theory.
We are about to build a similar pattern for cascades, and connect the snowball, domino, and butterfly effect together.
Once we understand the pattern, we’ll figure out how to influence cascades. Surprisingly, cascades are widespread in our personal life. So, the techniques we learn from professionals working with complex adaptive systems can transfer to our lives, too.
Let’s build intuition with examples. We can think of cascades as passing on something from one step to the next. Scroll to the next section as soon as…
