The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a 2007 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is a former options trader.

The book focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively.

[1] The book is part of Taleb's five-volume series, titled the Incerto, including Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007–2010), The Bed of Procrustes (2010–2016), Antifragile (2012), and Skin in the Game (2018).

[3] Taleb contends that banks and trading firms are vulnerable to hazardous Black Swan events and are exposed to losses beyond those predicted by their defective financial models.

Hence the objective should be to "avoid being the turkey", by identifying areas of vulnerability in order to "turn the Black Swans white".

Taleb has referred to the book as an essay or a narrative with one single idea: "our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly large deviations.

He uses an exact metaphor, the 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."

[7][8] The second chapter discusses a neuroscientist named Yevgenia Nikolayevna Krasnova, who rejects the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, and her book A Story of Recursion.

Chapter four brings together the topics discussed earlier into a narrative about a turkey before Thanksgiving who is fed and treated well for many consecutive days, only to be slaughtered and served as a meal.

Aristotle's "Prior Analytics" is the most likely original reference that makes use of example syllogisms involving the predicates "white", "black", and "swan."

[25] Mathematics professor David Aldous argued that "Taleb is sensible (going on prescient) in his discussion of financial markets and in some of his general philosophical thought, but tends toward irrelevance or ridiculous exaggeration otherwise.

[29] The Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote "The Black Swan changed my view of how the world works" and explains the influence in his own 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow.