https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289879/

I just finished The Butterfly Effect, and my mind is still processing the weight of it all. I could not help but view Evan’s journey as an experiment in causality—an uncontrolled, desperate attempt to optimize an outcome without fully understanding the system he was altering. Every change he made had cascading effects, much like tweaking a parameter in a model without accounting for hidden dependencies.

It made me think about intervention in complex systems—whether in AI, policy, or even personal decisions. Can we ever truly predict the ripple effects of our choices? Evan’s failures reminded me of the dangers of short-sighted optimization, where addressing one issue creates unintended harm elsewhere.

More than anything, the film left me questioning: If given the chance, would I change something in my own past? The rational side of me says no—uncertainty is fundamental to growth. But the human side? That is harder to answer.

The Lorentz butterfly

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Fun fact: scientists wrote about this idea in a special story 50 years ago. It was so cool that more than 61 movies and TV shows used "Butterfly Effect" in their names!

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