Dynamical explanations in the blogosphere

One of the core forms of explanation in the sciences is the dynamical model. What I have in mind, more specifically, are systems of "ordinary differential equations". We have some variables that vary over time, and for each one, we write how its time derivative depends on the other variables. For example, there's the Lotka-Volterra model, with two variables: the size of a population of prey animals, and the size of a population of predators. Instead of showing you the equations, I'll quote Scott Alexander's summary of the dynamics: Every so often predators (let’s say foxes) reproduce too quickly and outstrip the available supply of prey (let’s say rabbits). There is a brief period of starvation as foxes can’t find any more rabbits and die en masse. This usually ends with a boom-bust cycle: after most foxes die, the rabbits (who reproduce very quickly and are now free of predation) have a population boom; now there are rabbits everywhere. Eventually the foxes catch up, eat all the new rabbits, and the cycle repeats again. That's what it looks like in blog post style. I think it's interesting to see because a lot of blog posts are similar in form, even if they're not summarizing a model from a quantitative science. For example, let's say, Scott Alexander's post on "respectability cascades". Scott actually presents two conflicting models of respectability cascades, with opposite predictions. Should I say "models"? I don't want to call these "dynamical models"; there's no system of ordinary differential equations, though I guess you could easily make one up. I'll call them "dynamical explanations". Among the many mechanistic explanations you see in blog posts, dynamical explanations are those in terms of quantities varying over time, and whether they increase or decrease depends on the other quantities. The point of separately considering this kind of explanation is that we have this whole academic tradition of dynamical modeling available for formalizing them. I