The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
 Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to the book variously as an essay or a narrative with one single idea: "our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly large deviations." It is Taleb's questioning of why this occurs and his explanations of it that drive the book forward. The book's layout follows "a simple logic" moving from literary subjects in the beginning to scientific and mathematical subjects in the later portions. Part One and the beginning of Part Two delve into Psychology. Taleb addresses science and business in the latter half of Part Two and Part Three. Part Four contains advice on how to approach the world in the face of uncertainty and still enjoy life. Taleb acknowledges a contradiction in the book. He uses an exact metaphor, Black Swan Idea to argue against the "unknown, the abstract, and imprecise uncertain—white ravens, pink elephants, or evaporating denizens of a remote planet orbiting Tau Ceti." In the first chapter, the black swan theory first is discussed in relation to Taleb's coming of age in the Levant. The author then elucidates his approach to historical analysis. He describes history as opaque, essentially a black box of cause and effect. One sees events go in and events go out, but one has no way of determining which produced what effect. Taleb argues this is due to The Triplet of Opacity. In the second chapter, Taleb tells a fictional story of a character named Yevgenia Nikolayevna Krasnova and her book A Story of Recursion. She published her book on the web and was discovered by a small publishing company; they published her unedited work and the book became an international bestseller. The small publishing firm became a big corporation, and Yevgenia became famous. This incident is described as a Black Swan Event. Taleb seems to be using "recursion" as a hint that he is predicting the story of his own book The Black Swan—Yevgenia's rejection of fiction and nonfiction as categories is reminiscent of Taleb's idea, and her character seems autobiographical as Taleb may be poking fun at his own intolerant temperament. In the third chapter, Taleb introduces the concepts of Extremistan and Mediocristan. He uses them as guides to define how predictable is the environment one's studying. Mediocristan environments safely can use Gaussian distribution. In Extremistan environments, a Gaussian distribution is used at one's peril. Chapter four brings together the topics discussed earlier in the narrative, about a turkey. Taleb uses it to illustrate the philosophical problem of induction and how past performance is no indicator of future performance. He then takes the reader into the history of Skepticism. In Chapter nine, Taleb outlines the multiple topics he previously has described and connects them as a single basic idea.