Summary of The Black Swan

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a 2007 book by the storyteller and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology. Taleb also covers how such events are chronically underestimated, misrepresented by historical data, and ignored by various decision makers in diverse areas such as financial markets, politics, technology, and warfare. Taleb further looks at the robustness of what he calls the non-predictive or non-fragile methods of dealing with uncertainty and how they can be used to come up with an effective strategy in the face of unknown future events. The main message of the book is that people must try to deal with uncertainty and judge risks in ways different from traditional methods.