Student government tickets announced epidemiologist criticizes covid-19 policies

By ISA SHEIKH associate news editor

Jay bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and economist from stanford, was “blacklisted” by Twitter the day he joined the app. he carries a business card identifying himself as a “fringe epidemiologist,” quoting an email from francis collins, then the director of the national institutes of health, to anthony fauci. bhattacharya, an academic at the center of many of the nation’s debates over lockdowns, delivered an address Tuesday night to an event hosted by the economics department. bhattacharya was introduced by economics department chair eric sims as someone whose “views have not always been popular, and have sometimes contradicted official messaging from governments and public health professionals.” at 7 p.m. in d uncan s tudent c enter’s m idfield c ommons. The election will be held f eb. 8 between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. via nd c entral, which students will be able to sign into using their n otre d ame email and password. r esults are expected to be announced later that night.

By EMMA VALES news writer

fr. pete mccormick, assistant vice president for campus ministry, presided over a prayer service to end hatred and gun violence in the basilica of the sacred heart monday.

The altar was lined with candles, each accompanying a notecard with the name of a city that experienced gun violence in the past month. Jan. 2023 was a month with a record number of 49 mass shootings.

sims pointed out that bhattacharya’s advocacy has been rooted in the economic principle of tradeoffs, as well as following the science where it led him.

“in his work and in his commentary, dr. bhattacharya has questioned the wisdom of widespread masking and lockdowns, pointing to the high potential costs to society and noting that the a student speaking at the service said that according to the gun violence archive website, “a mass shooting is defined as an event in which a minimum of four people are injured or killed, not including the shooter.”

The service began with an opening hymn and remarks from mccormick. Then, a passage from the gospel of matthew 5, known as the beatitudes, was read. This well-known chapter of the bible preaches blessings for all people, including those who mourn, peacemakers and those who are persecuted. pfeil discussed her personal experience with the phillips family who were affected by the sandy hook elementary school shooting in 2012. pfeil concluded by quoting st. francis of a ssisi: “w hile you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.” mccormick concluded the service by leading a prayer for

The gospel reading was followed by a reflection from margaret pfeil, a teaching professor in the department of theology and the center for social concerns. pfeil reflected on the beatitudes and said that they are “an invitation to feel good” and a call to become peacemakers.

Two students then came forward to speak the names of 49 cities that experienced gun violence during the past month. The sheer amount of cities that the students listed emphasized the significance of the issue at hand.

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Wednesday “Dealing with Russia: Lessons from Cold War Sovietology”

Jenkins Nanovic Halls 12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. Lecture and lunch.

“Why It Matters to Talk about Abortion on Campus”

Carrol Auditorium 5 p.m. Lecture at SMC.

Thursday

“The Unintended Consequences of Peace” Hesburgh Center 12:30 p.m. - 1 p.m. Arie Kacowicz speaks. Holy Cross Trivia those who have been involved in gun violence and for an end to gun violence.

Friday “Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration” Geddes Hall 4 p.m. - 5 p.m. Lecture.

“Give us strength to walk in more ways to stand against injustice, to pray and advocate for peace,” mccormick said.

Upon departure, campus ministry handed out an informational flier with statistics about gun violence in the U.s and action items to take to prevent gun violence. The flier cited James 2:14-26, which says that “prayer bears fruit in action.” action items listed include sending a letter to representatives and other local leaders, joining various campus ministry faith and justice initiatives and promoting safety on campus. contact becky czarnecki at rczarne2@nd.edu to stay involved with campus ministry faith and justice initiatives.

Contact Emma Vales at evales@nd.edu benefits of such mitigation strategies might be smaller than belief,” sims said. “he’s been courageous in speaking out for what he believes and what the science tells him, and he’s become an outspoken proponent of the principles of free speech and academic freedom.” speaking in the debartolo Performing arts center’s decio Theatre, bhattacharya discussed the adverse effects of pandemic policy, emphasizing that for many of these effects, the blame lay not in the virus but in the decision to put lockdowns in place, which he deemed “an unnecessary overreaction.” bhattacharya spoke about his childhood visits to the Kolkata slum his mother grew up in and the rural hospital he spent a year at while a medical student as representations of global poverty’s manifestations in india. he also recalled the panic over the h1n1 swine flu epidemic in 2009, remembering how the panic subsided when the infection fatality rate was revealed to be much lower than previously expected.

These two pieces of background led to bhattacharya’s skepticism around covid-era public policy. This ultimately brought his voice to the forefront of an international conversation around the virus. conducting a series of studies early in the pandemic identifying the infection fatality rate, bhattacharya and his colleagues found that a far higher number of people had antibodies for the virus than expected, meaning that far more people had covid-19 than hospitalizations indicated, and a far smaller percentage were experiencing severe disease or death. he argued not only that the risk was lower than expected, but that decisions were made in a one-size-fitsall manner.

“We knew early in the pandemic exactly where the risk was, there’s a thousand-fold or more difference in the risk of dying from infection from the youngest to the oldest,” bhattacharya said. “but the public health messaging was that we’re all in it together and that young people needed to sacrifice their lives in order to protect older people. The decision was made without really a discussion of the population at large.” he then went through cases in which the policy response to covid-19 caused harm across the globe. cataloging a dramatic rise in extreme poverty, bhattacharya cited a World bank report to argue that the advances made by globalism and development economics had been pulled back, pushing millions of people into starvation. chronicling the ways in which other health efforts — such as measles and polio vaccination in africa and cancer screenings around the world — were put on the back burner as part of the covid-19 response, he demonstrated how deaths had risen related to those conditions. he argued that the global approach to managing the covid-19 pandemic allowed those diseases and others like tuberculosis to reemerge in extreme ways, particularly among the poor. school closures were also discussed. he described Uganda’s experience, where millions of children were completely removed from school for two years, with no internet or Zoom to provide a substitute for in-person education. many of the families were pushed further into poverty, feeding into issues of sex trafficking and child labor. millions of students in Uganda will never return to school as a result of the extended lockdowns and economic reverberations, bhattacharya claimed. he contrasted the american approach with the swedish approach, where children were in-person for school with “no disruption, no masks” and no student fatalities were reported. Teachers in the country, bhattacharya said, were similarly unlikely to see fatality. he continued his “depressing litany” of statistics with mental health harms and the exponential rise in serious suicidal ideation among young people. bhattacharya ultimately said lockdown policies were “at the luxury of the laptop class,” driving global and domestic inequalities far deeper. discussing covid-19 and the ways in which churches responded, bhattacharya said considerations of human equality and dignity were challenged by the pandemic response. following his address, bhattacharya answered audience questions. Junior merlot fogarty asked about the University’s booster mandate, requiring students to receive their fourth shot. bhattacharya called the decision “a bad idea.” bhattacharya called for a reckoning among his field and scientific bureaucrats who had shut down academic debate over the issues at hand.

“now when they wrote this, they wrote it saying that the pandemic caused this, that the virus caused this, but this is not the pandemic. This is not the virus. This was the decision by Western governments to lock down, which had knock-on economic consequences around the world,” he said.

“We reversed a generation of poverty reduction with the decision to lockdown,” he continued.

“The message i heard from some of the churches, that treating each other as biohazards is an act of love. i don’t think that’s the right message. i’m a christian. i don’t think that’s the message i believe,” he said.

“i don’t think there’s almost any benefit for the vast majority of people here,” he said. bhattacharya pointed to scientific arguments against requiring further doses, as well as the approach taken in norway and denmark, where only those above 50 are given the booster unless for some medical reason urged by their doctor.

“The starting point is an open acknowledgment of error,” he said. “Until that happens, there’s no chance of gaining back the trust of the majority. no matter what your position on lockdowns and whatever are, it’s clear we failed. it’s very clear that we didn’t stop many people from getting covid.”

Contact Isa Sheikh at isheikh@nd.edu

University,” russo said, including two experts who work specifically on generative ai russo described the mixed reaction to chatGPT among both faculty and administration.

“i think there are concerns and excitement,” she said, adding that “the reason i was immediately concerned about it was because of the academic integrity side of it. i think it could be a really cool technology to use. i’m not opposed to it in general. The reason i wanted to start working on it right away was because i was concerned about students using it as a shortcut, rather than as a tool to their learning.” in her communications to faculty, russo has outlined two approaches to addressing chatGPT. First, creating assignments that use the chatbot as a part of the assignment itself, or secondly, designing “assignments that are chatGPTproof.” in guidance to faculty, russo wrote that “the more specific your assignments are, the less chatGPT can do.” russo emphasized the variability of chatGPT response quality. The faculty guidance says that “even when the responses given are technically correct, the quality of the content varies greatly. sometimes it does extremely good work and other times it does not.”

How ChatGPT works chatGPT uses a generative ai model, nitesh chawla said, referring to algorithms that can be used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations and videos. chawla is the director of the Lucy Family institute for data and society and a professor of computer science and engineering at notre dame. he explained that like existing search engines, chatGPT can be used to find answers to user questions. but producing a unique response in whichever form the user asks for makes chatGPT, in chawla’s words, “a search engine on steroids.” chatGPT is an “engineering marvel,” chawla said, but it cannot actively seek out new information in the way that humans do.

“if you are given a situation that you have never ever encountered before in your life, you would go, ‘oh, i need to learn it,’” chawla said. “now, that is what chatGPT is not doing. chatGPT is basically saying, ‘you have taught me everything that i could be taught and i will answer based on what i have been taught.’” chawla described how the ai sources its learning through human training. russo emphasized to The observer that chatGPT can, on occasion, very confidently provide incorrect information.

“chatGPT is, in the simplistic way, a massive language model that has been trained with an extremely large volume of text or documents, which has also been trained with some human feedback into it, which has allowed it to learn or correct itself,” chawla said.

“The overall accuracy of chatGPT is something we should pay attention to. how reliable is it really? i guess we don’t know that yet,” she said. chawla also expressed concern about the accuracy of chatGPT and similar language models.

“chatGPT will string words together based on what it has seen,” he said. “now, what if those answers or their responses are not grounded?”

“We have to really be very careful and say, ‘chatGPT is a valid tool for functions a, b and c do not use it beyond that,’” chawla said. “We haven’t put those guardrails up yet.”

Generative AI in the classroom

The administration’s largely open-ended approach has allowed faculty to take disparate approaches to chatGPT and other ai tools. While some have outright banned usage of the site in their classes, andrew Gould, a political science professor, wrote new sections into his syllabi about ai tools, allowing students to consult the program.

“You may consult artificial intelligence (ai) technology such as chatGPT. You must still convey the truth about your sources and the truth about your own contributions to the essay,” Gould’s “european Politics” syllabus specifies.

“however, ai technologies have not been trained on material about recent events. moreover, ai technologies can produce output that is incorrect. if you quote or paraphrase from ai output in your written work, you must cite the ai source.” ai technologies “can respond to queries with useful summaries and syntheses of conventional wisdom,”

Gould told The observer.

“i found that asking [short response] questions that are similar to the kinds of questions i asked my students, the very good ones that i’ve gotten from chatGPT seem like b+ or b answers to me, but very good responses,” Gould said.

When asked about the possibility of a student attempting to pass off a chatGPT essay as their own work, Gould said he has “zero” concern.

“it’s very difficult to, in an unacknowledged way, use chatGPT, add some course-specific material and not reveal that chatGPT played a role in formulation of the argument or the evidence or the overall structure,” he said. dan Lindley, another political science professor, disagrees, forbidding use of generative ai in his classes. he said the development of ai in education is taking academia “by storm,” and called the recent developments “a frightful prospect” and “bad for education.”

“i think it’s a potential threat to the learning process. anytime students can take the easy way out, it’s not as good as the hard way in,” Lindley said. “Learning how to write is not easy, and learning how to write is associated with clarifying your own thoughts and trying to simplify things that are difficult. and chatGPT takes that all away.” he’s nonetheless impressed with the site’s abilities to work so quickly.

Gould said that in his experimentation with the technology, there are gaps in the site’s current ability.

“asking questions that really take some expertise, it seems to fall flat, so i would not be impressed if the student said in an email, ‘here’s this comment’ [in response to a course question]. i would think the student didn’t really get it,” Gould said.

“but getting a b+ in a half a second or less. That’s pretty impressive. Like you could say, ‘oh gee,’ but to me, it seems pretty powerful. and then areas outside of my expertise, the answers seem great,” he said.

Challenging status quo education

susan blum, an anthropologist who most recently wrote the book “Ungrading: Why rating students Undermines Learning (and What to do instead),” said the emergence of ai prompts larger questions about the education system itself.

“We talk about academic integrity, but there’s really a deeper issue that we almost never talk about, which is, what is the purpose of education? Why are the students there? What do they actually want to get out of what they’re learning,” she said.

blum, who’s also written a book specifically about plagiarism and college culture, approached the issue of ai being used in the classroom with a retrospective view of technology affecting educational environments throughout her lifetime. For example, she said she remembers the advent of calculators, which some worried would have a detrimental effect on students’ abilities in math.

“‘You had to do the math yourself by hand, because students have to learn how to do math.’ Well, maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but i use a calculator all the time,” blum said. “People would think now that it’s a very silly argument that we should forbid calculators.”

“i see chatGPT as another development in the continuous invention of new technologies that will have a role to play in our lives. i see this as an educational problem, not an ethical problem,” she added.

Gould similarly believes that generative ai programs “have the potential to transform radically the nature of work throughout the economy throughout the world,” and for professors to implement a “blanket policy not to consult it or use it is a mistake.”

“do we sit students in a room and have them write by hand so that they can’t consult anything? some people are proposing that,” blum said. “maybe we have to really rethink our teaching.” blum said ai technologies will be practical for students hoping to achieve high test scores, making it so appealing for students that a ban might not be effective.

“Until we have more interesting stuff, this is going to be something that students turn to, and i think forbidding it won’t work,” blum said.

The University is conscious of those ideas. russo said that courses should have a deeper aim to encourage learning among students, above the simple pursuit of grades.

“i think that the more motivated they are to learn the material because it’s interesting and relevant, the less they’ll want to go online and just turn in something. i feel like our students should want to be better than a machine,” russo said. “and so i’m hoping that that will be enough to deter students. You know, when you’re at a dinner with friends and a conversation topic comes up, you’re gonna want to chime in on the conversation, not be like, ‘well, let me see, let me put this into chatGPT and see what chatGPT thinks about it,’” she added.

Implications for the future

russo, chawla, blum, Gould and Lindley all shared an agreement that generative ai is still in its infancy and will continue to grow and adapt.

“i think there’s a general awareness that we’re in a very early period of chatGPT and i understand there’s a new version coming out, which will be even better. i know that the current version doesn’t know anything that happened past 2021, but the new version will be updated. so i think there’s a general awareness that we want to kind of wait and see where it goes,” russo said.

Gould said chatGPT will continue to improve and get rid of current flaws in the content it produces. “That’s why i think we should engage, not prohibit,” he said.

he discussed the broader societal impacts of such technology, which he predicts will rapidly take shape in the years to come.

“i think we’re just at the beginning of figuring out what the impact is. i have shared with seminar students my concern that employers hire us for our skills and abilities to do things for them. They do not hire us for our emotions,” Gould said.

“so i think we, and people entering the job market, have to ask ourselves, ‘what can i do that ai cannot do?,’ or ‘what can i do with ai that ai cannot do by itself?’ That, to me, seems like a pretty serious question. and so yeah, there’s the danger that ai can replace the kind of general skills and intellectual work that we train our students for.”

Contact Liam Price at lprice3@nd.edu and Isa Sheikh at isheikh@nd.edu