Lecture 01 — The forensic turn

Why "is this real?" became a methods question, and how a course about bullshit became a course about slop

22 February 2027

In 2005 the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a short, serious essay called On Bullshit, arguing that bullshit is worse than lying because a liar at least cares what the truth is. In 2020, two data scientists built an entire undergraduate course — and later a bestselling book — out of that essay, teaching students to spot bullshit dressed up as data. In 2023, a Princeton computer scientist called a chatbot’s confident nonsense “a bullshit generator” and meant it as a precise diagnosis, not an insult.

This course sits at the next turn in that lineage. The bullshit used to be handmade — a pundit reaching for a persuasive-sounding statistic, an ad department reaching for a graph. It is now manufactured at a scale no human liar could match, by systems with no stake in the truth at all, and it arrives looking exactly as polished as the real thing. We call the residue slop, and this course teaches you to work a case.

Outline#

• what changed between “bullshit” and “slop” — scale, intent, and confidence
• the forensic stance: evidence, chain of custody, and the discipline of not guessing
• what the next eleven weeks build toward: your own investigations, not just your own opinions

Before you arrive#

Read the syllabus end to end and bring one piece of content — a text, an image, a clip — that you already suspect is synthetic. You will not be asked to prove it yet. Just bring your hunch; week 2 is where hunches get held to a standard.

Further reading#

Calling Bullshit is the course this one answers directly — read the home page for the tone this course is aiming for, and note the disclaimer at the bottom, which parodies the exact rhetorical style the course teaches you to spot.