White Swan
The White Swan represents the archetypical mental image that arises when one is presented with the word ‘swan.’ An implicit association of the bird swan is made with the word white. Swans are seldom believed to exist in any other color. Taleb uses the ‘White Swan’ as an analogy for the expected, the predicted and the probable. Similar to the color of swans, we make predictions in our day to day lives, which hold true under most circumstances. For instance, it is assumed that when we see a dog, it will possess four legs and bark. In our professional and personal lives, such ‘White Swans’ can be easily predicted and our past experience serves as a valuable tool we can use to enhance accuracy of these predictions. For instance, the more often an individual plays a sport, the better they will become at predicting the best course of action to be taken during a given scenario.
Black Swan
The Black Swan is presented as the antithesis to the White Swan. Until the end of the 17th century, every swan sighted was white in color. The discovery of Black Swans was equally consequential for epistemology as it was for ornithology. By assuming that swans were white, the possibility that non white swans could exist had been dismissed, and the result was a discovery that shocked believers of the White Swan myth to the core. Taleb uses the symbol of a Black Swan to denote unexpected events in history and finance. The United States stock market crash of 1987 is cited as a classic example, with a 22% fall in market value in a single day. Prior to 1987, markets had never plunged so much in such a short period of time, which is why predictors had failed to extend their imaginations to such a possibility occurring. The phrase ‘Black Swan’ was selected for its unique properties as an outlier, in both an aesthetic and epistemological sense.
Anti Library
The philosopher Umberto Eco was said to possess an enormous library of 30,000 books. What is interesting from the perspective of knowledge, is that a majority of these books were unread. Taleb selects this anecdote to illustrate the importance of the unknown. Had Umberto Eco laid emphasis on merely what he knew and selected only those books which he had read for his library, he would be restricting himself to a limited scope of knowledge. By giving his anti library equal importance, he becomes a legendary figure in the discipline of knowledge seeking, as he openly acknowledges what he does not know. A major idea woven into the fabric of the novel is that human beings seldom pay attention to what they do not know, and this failure to build a comprehensive anti library of knowledge dooms the intellectual to inevitable failure.
Mediocristan
Taleb maps out two provinces in his intellectual map of improbability. Mediocristan is selected not to reflect the mediocrity of most human pursuits, but rather to illustrate why human beings get trapped into this framework. In Mediocristan, there are no extreme winners or losers. By extreme, the author implies that no single person or observation has the power to influence or challenge the status quo which all other persons occupy. An example of this is weight, height and any other physiological attribute. If ten thousand people were lined up and measured in terms of height, neither the weight of the tallest person nor that of the shortest person would be able to exert a significant amount of influence on the average. Attributes that belong to Mediocristan can be perfectly described using the Gaussian bell curve as a reference point.
Extremistan
This second province on Taleb’s map is the one in which a majority of affairs in the real world are carried out. In Extremistan, a single person or observation can have an extreme quantitative and qualitative impact on the status quo and those living in it. Example include book sales and financial crashes. If ten thousand authors were lined up, and one of them was JK Rowling, author of the globally famed Harry Potter series, it is highly probable that JK Rowling’s book sales would be several hundred times the volume of all the other authors’ book sales combined. Similarly, the 1987 financial crash wiped out wealth that had taken decades to compound in a day. In Extremistan, bell curve statistics cannot be effective, as these extreme observations could be several hundred standard deviations away from the average.
