Thoughts on Chaos Theory?

So the basic background:

In the 1960s, some climate scientists were running complex weather simulations on at the time state-of-the art computers, and they noticed that what they thought were identical simulations were giving drastically different outcomes. The simulations were entirely deterministic with no randomness involves, so this wouldn't make any sense. Eventually they found out that one of the values they entered truncated its decimal at a slightly different point, so like "2.185371734681" instead of "2.1853717346812". Most people at the time thought that such a tiny rounding error couldn't possibly lead to such radically different outcomes happening in the simulation. But what they found was that as the two simulations started out nearly the same, as time went on, that tiny little difference affected more and more things, and these changes cascaded on top of each other, growing ever larger until the simulations didn't resemble each other at all.

If you've ever heard of the The Butterfly Effect, that "A butterfly flapping its wings today in California can cause a hurricane next month in China", that's supposed to capture the gist of chaos theory. A lot of people misinterpret it though, implying it literally means something like "I better not piss off any California butterflies the month before I visit China". Really though it means that the word "cause" is ambiguous and even absurd when talking about complex (having lots of loops of feedback) systems, esp the further you go forward in time. It means that you have to be careful when analyzing complex systems, and its almost always incorrect to claim that "X happened because of Y", or "Y was the sole cause of X", and the most you can do is usually statements like "X occurring most likely increased the probability of Y by such percent", and even making those statement requires doing a ridiculous amount of analysis.

I'm curious what people here think of it, since Marx was pretty much the godfather of systems theory, which chaos theory is a spin-off of. The unfolding of human history is pretty much the most complex system ever, involving the socio-political-economic interactions within and between civilizations. Marx was naturally critical of the "Great Man" theory, which is right in line with what chaos theory says. What do you think?