Week 1: Live Bullshitting: A Demonstration Performed Without Preparation
Week 1 — the convenor bullshits an entire lecture live and unprepared, so the room can identify afterwards, cold, exactly what worked
22 February 2027
Harry Frankfurt’s distinction is the one the whole course runs on: a liar still cares about the truth, enough to hide it, while the bullshitter has stopped caring whether a claim is true at all, only whether it lands. Frankfurt names this “indifference to how things really are,” and week 1 puts that indifference on display, live, with nothing rehearsed to fall back on.
Outline#
- a cold-open bullshit, no warm-up, no citations
- a live diff between “sounds right” and “is right,” and why nobody in the room can tell the difference on the first pass
- what “minimal effort, maximal outside-the-box thinking” means as a design constraint rather than an excuse
- what to have ready before next week’s descent into abstraction
Teaching team
- Professor Genevieve Erik — convenor