Each seminar participant will take part in a reading group for one of the following books:

• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2007. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House.
• Tetlock, Philip E, and Gardner Dan. 2015. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. New York: Crown Publishers.
• Silver, Nate. 2012. The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don’t. New York: Penguin Press.
• Agrawal, Ajay, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. 2018. Prediction Machines : The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
• Derman, Emanuel. 2011. Models. Behaving. Badly. Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster on Wall Street and in Life. New York: Free Press.

Reading groups consist of six to seven students. Each group will present their book in one of the sessions in the second half of the semester. Each reading group will select an excerpt from the book as a class reading for the session and provide a task for the entire class. The task can either be a question pertaining to the reading or a general task related to the topic of the book.

Book presentation sessions are structured as follows:

1. Presentation of the book: Two or three students present the content of the book and its main claims (45 minutes followed by plenary Q&A).
2. Debate: The book is cirtically debated. Two students provide an endorsement of the book, two provide criticism (20 minutes for each side, followed by a moderated debate).
3. Plenary Discussion

Group participants

Taleb, The Black Swan (18 April)
Cedric Kessler
Simon Sommer
Nikos Leounakis
Andreas Loretz
Marius Frei
Svenja Becker
Matthias Pulver

Silver, The Signal and the Noise (25 April)
Arnaud Ray
Alexander Ewertz
Veit Henneberger

Agrawal, Gans & Goldfarb, Prediction Machines (02 May)
Lone Myrtue
Santino Fastuca
Jan Niclas Müller
Jakub Čermák
Lucas Arbeiter
Evžen Harant
Ilgiz Mashrapov

Tetlock & Gardner, Superforecasting (09 May)
Fabrice Bickel
Matteo Goldschmid
Niclas Schmidt
Wanli Ren
Mischa Herzog
Noémie Gardaz
Manuel Bussmann

Derman, Models Behaving Badly (16 May)
Ludovic Tuchschmid
Marc Grau
Yash Maheshwari