I think Adam Smith (an economist) said it long before these guys when he postulated his
Invisible Hand theory.
Your post was very illuminating and I will be taking a closer look. The Smith peice pretty much sums up where I'm coming from - that chaotic systems behaviour is the sum of countless other small scale actions acting independently. No single action or lack of action dictates the outcome.
To use your stock market analogy, no single small investor moves the market - its the sum of ALL the small investors (forget the big boys - mutual fund managers, Warren Buffet, etc. for the moment).
Put another way, here is an experiment that I propose: Take a chaotic system and "bottle it." Now, put it through a process so as to generate an outcome. Now, replicate that process over and over again but each time, remove ONE variable and put back the previously removed variable until the process has been run without the contribution of each variable in the system at least once. That is to say if there are ten variables, remove one and run it. Then put it back, remove a different one and run it again. When you are done, you will have run the process 10 times: once with 10 variables and 9x with 9 but a different 9 each time. Obviously, the values of the variables must be held constant.
My hypothesis is that the outcomes would never change because no
single variable can change the outcome. If a single variable
could influence the outcome then the system wouldn't be chaotic. It if for this (hypothesized) reason that I cannot accept the butterfly example.
Even if I am wrong (very possible), at least I hope I have explained my objections clearly.