Monday, August 16, 2010

TED Book Club


TED has just sent out the latest books for the Book Club.
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home is Dan Ariely's latest book. I loved his first book Predictably Irrational. It was full of great anecdotes and research about how irrationally people act in practice, although they are convinced they are behaving totally rationally. So I fully expect to like this book too. By the way, when I went to Dan's site to get the book cover image for this post, I discovered his blog, which I really love.




The other book is by Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. This book argues that things are getting better, and we have good reason to be optimistic about the future. Again, this book looks pretty interesting. TED makes a practice of trying to bring forward optimistic themes - this year's TED Global theme was And Now the Good News.

Ridley also has a blog at his site, although it didn't seem as breezy and inviting as Ariely's.

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