Butterfly Effect explained

[Steve James]

It's not that nothing is predictable. It's that you don't know the effect that the flutter of a single butterfly's wings will have. Do you know?

As to your personal abilities (to build good will, for ex), there are several old sayings, such as "The best laid plans of mice and men..." and about "the best intentions." Anyway, even if you could predict all the results of your actions, you can't predict how someone else will respond or the results of that response.

In science/philosophy, there's also the Heisenberg "principle of uncertainty." But, the point of this article, iinm, was to show how the popular understanding of the "butterfly effect" is exactly the opposite of what it was meant to illustrate.