Live Bullshitting#
A Demonstration Performed Without Preparation
Week 1 · no readings · no rehearsal
Ground rules for the next fifty minutes#
- nothing on these slides was checked before you walked in
- the convenor is going to bullshit an entire topic, live, and you’re going to watch it happen
- your job is not to believe it — your job is to spot the exact moment it starts working
Bullshit is produced with “indifference to how things really are.”
— Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (2005)
The distinction that matters#
- a liar cares about the truth — enough to carefully avoid it
- a bullshitter has stopped caring whether a claim is true at all
- only one of those is what this course teaches, and it isn’t lying
What you’re marking, silently, while this happens#
- confident delivery, holding under a follow-up question
- a claim that sounds specific but resolves to nothing checkable
- the exact sentence where the room stopped noticing
The live bit happens here#
(This slide intentionally has no content. The topic is picked in the room.)
After the bullshit: the diff#
- what was actually said, versus what it felt like was said
- where “sounds right” and “is right” quietly diverged
- why nobody caught it on the first pass — including you
Before next week#
- “minimal effort, maximal outside-the-box thinking” is a design constraint for this course, not an excuse for it
- week 2 turns today’s live diff into a theory: abstraction, and why it’s the load-bearing wall of everything that follows
Questions#
None of them are on the syllabus yet. That’s next week’s problem.