During my practicum I have read two books related to prediction, statistics, and randomness.
1. The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver
Most of our strengths and weaknesses as a nation—our ingenuity and our industriousness, our arrogance and our impatience—stem from our unshakable belief in the idea that we choose our own course.
Nate Silver
In his book Nate Silver attempts to introduce the reader to healthy skepticism when it comes to predictions and modelling. He surveys topics ranging from weather, to earthquake predictions. He presents one of the innate human biases through these topics, the bias that we think that we are better at prediction than we really are. Moreover, he addresses the human incapacity to sometimes identify a signal within the noise by vouching for predictions that include uncertainty measures and unbiased observation of events.
2. The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow
Random events often look like nonrandom events, and in interpreting human affairs we must take care not to confuse the two.
Leonard Mlodinow
In The Drunkard's Walk, the author attempts to follow through the thread of how probability, chance, and error became so central in understanding the inherent nature of life—random and complex. Mlodinow describes the first attempts at understanding probability and builds upon the theories of Cardano, Galileo, Bernoulli, Fermat, to consider more modern topics in statistics and probability theory such as Central Limit Theorem or Normal Distribution. He concludes his book, by discussing how humans think in terms of causality and how this aptitude is important in making scientific discoveries or becoming successful.
You can read more about my vision on science here.