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Positive feedback loops amplify movement in whatever direction it
was moving. This process of amplification in a given direction is called
being 'far-from-equilibrium'.

Limits to Growth

A positive feedback process cannot go on forever. This is the basis of
the limits to growth hypothesis in ecological thinking; a positive

feedback runs into resource limitations and ceases. In business, such
limits to growth are set by, for example, the population of possible
buyers.

Sensitivity to Initial Conditions: The Butterfly

Effect...

Technically, in the mathematics of chaos theory, the 'butterfly effect' is
the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change

in a starting parameter can result in large differences in outcome.

The term 'butterfly effect, was coined by Edward Lorenz (building on
thoughts by French mathematician and engineer Henri Poincaré and
American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener). The name
is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado

(the exact time of formation, the exact path that is taken) being
influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of
a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect

when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition
data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would
fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded input data.

A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly

different outcome. Lorenz linked the concept of instability to the
properties positive feedback loops. The amplification of small
differences.

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