The one part of this course that isn't bullshit: a real, checkable source for every claim on it.
The course is about bullshit. The reading list is not. Every source below is real, resolves to an actual publication, and backs the week that cites it. If you want to check whether a lecture is telling the truth about a source, this is the list to check it against — nothing here is invented, paraphrased past recognition, or attributed to a source that didn’t say it.
Each week’s lecture page names its own anchor source; this page is the full set, in case you want to read further than the week requires.
| Source | Used for |
|---|---|
| Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton University Press. | Definition: bullshit as indifference to truth, not lying. |
| Bergstrom, C. T., & West, J. D. (2020). Calling Bullshit. Random House. callingbullshit.org | The detection course this one is the supply side of. |
| Snyder, B. R. (1971). The Hidden Curriculum. MIT Press. | Students learn what assessment rewards, not what the course claims. |
| Strathern, M. (1997). ‘Improving ratings’: Audit in the British university system. European Review, 5(3), 305–321. | When a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring anything. |
| Parkinson, C. N. (1955). Parkinson’s law. The Economist. | Work expands to fill the time available for it — the course’s brief-timing policy, stated plainly. |
| Mednick, S. A. (1962). The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review, 69(3), 220–232. | Creativity as connecting remote ideas. |
| Hicks, M. T., Humphries, J., & Slater, J. (2024). ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics and Information Technology, 26. | LLM output as Frankfurtian bullshit. |
| Chu, A. H. C., & Choi, J. N. (2005). Rethinking procrastination. Journal of Social Psychology, 145(3), 245–264. | Active procrastinators perform fine under pressure. |
| Pennycook, G., et al. (2015). On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. Judgment and Decision Making, 10(6), 549–563. | Why vague abstraction reads as profound. |
| Sokal, A. (1996). Transgressing the boundaries. Social Text, 46/47. | Case study: nonsense that got published. |
| Petrocelli, J. V. (2018). Antecedents of bullshitting. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 76, 249–258. | People bullshit when they won’t be held accountable for it. |
| Turpin, M. H., et al. (2021). Bullshit ability as an honest signal of intelligence. Evolutionary Psychology, 19(2). | The case for grading it at 20%. |
| Swift, J. (1729). A Modest Proposal. | Deadpan satire that follows absurd logic seriously. |
| Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs. Simon & Schuster. | Links assignment bullshit to the societal kind. |
| Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32, 347–364. | The LO-to-assessment structure this course parodies while using it straight. |
One name that comes up in week 3 and won’t be on this list, because he isn’t an academic source: Ralph Lauren, used as a real-world case study of building an empire out of a random object, not as a citation.