Category: P06: Refutation Argument

Rebuttal- Ugandanknuckles

To many, the biggest issue with mantras is that they are ineffective and limited only to the chosen few who devote their lives to it. A study done by The University of Waterloo and The University of New Brunswick is in support of that idea as it says,

“…present results suggest that for certain people, positive self-statements may be not only ineffective, but actually detrimental. When people with low self-esteem repeated the statement, ‘I’m a lovable person,’ or focused on ways in which this statement was true of them, neither their feelings about themselves nor their moods improved—they got worse. Positive self-statements seemed to provide a boost only to people with high self-esteem—those who ordinarily feel good about themselves already—and that boost was small.”

Scientific proof of this common claim is enough for most people to shut out mantras completely, but this concern is flawed as it was never argued that mantras would work for just anyone. Also, mantras are more than just saying a basic statement of “I’m a lovable person,” as most would seem to believe it is.

Mantras are made to work for people who have high self-clarity. Self-clarity is defined by Melissa Dahl as, “how well we know our own strengths and weaknesses, as well as our ability to accept them.” This is where most people run into trouble. They think that self-esteem is the key. For the most part, self-esteem is overrated. Melissa Dahl, a writer for the New York Times, states that,

…high self-esteem inflates your ego, which can make the reality of how others see you harder to bear. With high self-clarity, though, you can see and accept yourself much more easily–even your flaws. But this form of self-acceptance doesn’t leave you there, gaping at your imperfections.

Boosting our self-clarity is important to using mantras because we need to be in-tune with ourselves. We have to have a good understanding of who we are on the inside before we can look introspectively for positive energy and power. Self-clarity can be learned through embracing mistakes we have made, and realizing that everyone makes mistakes. Changing ones’s philosophy from that of a pessimist to that of a realist isn’t necessary, but looking at things from a neutral standpoint rather than a negative one is key.

Mantras harness the power of sound, and Gabriel Axel wrote a great article on how sound effects the body on October 2, 2013, in the US News Website. Different sounds have different meanings, such as a car screeching to a halt followed by a crashing sound is connected with an accident and all that entails. Axel states that the word mantra is Sanskrit for “sound tool,” and that many languages evolved to include onomatopoeia to make use of the movement of energy through those words.

This evocation is qualitative and subjective and is linked with interoception (inner body sensations) and emotional sense of self, both predominantly represented in the right hemisphere of the brain. Conversely, the narrative strand of sounds in which we give them meaning is done predominantly through the left hemisphere.

Sound itself, from a physics standpoint, will resonate in different parts of the body and mind before it is assigned a meaning. The different areas where the sound resonates can make you feel different emotions, or remember old memories. Feelings and effects will vary from person to person, but the best effects are found in people who know themselves. The better the condition of the body and mind, the better the outcome. People who become well versed in mantra usage can eventually not even have to use their voices because the feelings produced by their voice can be replicated through their thoughts alone.

Horton, A. P. (2018, February 16). Positive Self-Esteem Is Overrated, Here’s What You Need Instead. Retrieved March 17, 2018, from https://www.fastcompany.com/40531879/positive-self-esteem-is-overrated-heres-what-you-need-instead

Click to access 03_wood_etal_selfstatements_psychscience2009.pdf

Axel, Gabriel. “Your Brain on Om: The Science of Mantra.” US News, 2 Oct. 2013, 11:27, health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/2013/10/02/your-brain-on-om-the-science-of-mantra.

Rebuttal Essay – summergirl1999

College: Grand Slam or Scam?

Every student has the choice to attend college. Getting asked the question “Are you going to college?” can be challenging for some students. College is a big decision to make and it comes with many factors. College can benefit or drawback students, depending on the specific student. (Student A and Student C.) In American society, a college degree in American holds weight. Working towards a college degree shows employers that students are motivated to succeed. A college degree can determine raises, well-paying careers, and most importantly success. Students encounter their own personal and financial issues, and college can have the effect of leaving students in sticky situations. Even with a college degree, a career and well-paying stable job in the student’s field of study is not guaranteed.

Students will make more money from attending college. Students attend college so they can make themselves more marketable to the career field, and to also make a good and stable amount of income.

“A college graduate earns more than a non-graduate.  Plain and simple.  Studies have shown that there is an average of $25,000 earnings difference between grads and non-grads.  Furthermore, this gap is widening every year.  The bottom line is that pursuing a degree increases the ability to find work in the same field, increasing experience and earning potential” (CBD College.)

Having a college degree can give a graduate the opportunity to receive higher paying salaries and stable incomes. A college degree can also give a student the potential to receive higher raises. Not every student who receives a degree gets a stable income. Student A attended college, received a degree, and found a career that had a stable salary. Student C attended college, received a degree, and found a job that offered salaries that do not pay enough to pay off student’s expenses. The push to try to make students attend college is leaving many students optioning out the “build your own business” idea, which is the idea many of the billionaires in today’s society had.

“25 of the top-paying jobs that don’t require a four-year degree and their average salaries, based on data from the BLS and CBSSalary.com It is important to note that some of these jobs DO require some kind of a degree, just not a 4-year degree. As many have commented below many of the jobs do require formal training of some kind or even a two-year degree” (Seed Time.)

College graduates can potentially have better employment opportunities. Students go to college so they have a high chance of getting a career in their field of study. Many college graduates (Student A), take-out loans or pay the expensive college tuition because the money they can potentially make from their careers after college is worth it.

“College freshman in 2015 said they attended college to “be able to get a better job.” In Jan. 2017, the unemployment rate for college graduates aged 25 and over with a bachelor’s degree was 2.5% compared to 3.8% for those with some college or associate’s degrees, 5.3% for high school graduates, and 7.7% for high school dropouts” (Pro Con).

After college, graduates use their degree to get a career in their field of study that they potentially could not get if they did not go to college. Although many people get to use their degree for their benefit by obtaining their “perfect” or/and “dream” career after college (Student A), not all students get to use their degree for their benefit. Even with a college degree, after college not all graduates are able to get a career (Student C.) There is a lot of comparing applications for the job position. The work place is very competitive, potentially thousands of people can be applying for the same position.

“This is a real issue unique to this generation called ‘a quarter-life crisis,'” said Cyrus Williams, a licensed professional counselor and an associate professor at Regent University in Virginia. Millennials are “struggling in terms of milestones, getting jobs, parenting, finding jobs, having too many choices, and having debt coming right out of college” (CNBC.)

College tuition is very expense, most college students take out student loans which they are obligated to pay back approximately six months after graduation, so not being able to get a stable, well-paying job after college can lead to major set-backs for college graduates. Graduates who do not get jobs after college are required to pay for necessities such as rent, utilities, and food. Even if graduates are not using their degree they are still obligated to pay back their student loans as soon as six months after graduation.

Student loans are not as bad as they seem. Since college tuition is outrageously expensive, most students do not have the money to pay for it. But there is a solution to that problem, to take out student loans. Students who do not have the money for college, take out loans from banks so they can attend college. Banks loan student’s money in return for the students to pay them bank monthly after the student graduates.

“Average monthly student loan payment (for borrower aged 20 to 30 years): $351. Median monthly student loan payment (for borrower aged 20 to 30 years): $203” (Student Loan Hero.)

The goal for after college is to acquire a stable career that comes with a stable salary, so the monthly student loans will become manageable for the graduate (Student A). That scenario makes attending college worth it and beneficial. On the other hand (Student C), students take out student loans from a bank for a four-year university. After college, many students cannot find a job in their field of study but they still have to pay for necessities so they are forced to get minimum wage job which pays approximately $7.25. Students attend college so they can get a career where they can earn raises and move up in the company, not a regular job. People have their own personal and finical problems, so without a steady paying career can lead graduates to make certain decisions they potentially would not make if they had stable income.

References

9 BENEFITS OF EARNING A COLLEGE DEGREE. (2016, December 09). Retrieved March 16, 2018, from https://www.cbd.edu/9-benefits-college-degree/

[Create AP-style references to match the edited model above. —DSH]

https://christianpf.com/paying-jobs-without-degree/

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/08/millennials-face-life-after-college-finding-a-quarter-life-crisis-instead-of-dream-jobs.html

https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/financialfinesse/2016/08/07/why-your-student-loan-debt-may-not-be-as-bad-as-it-seems/#61095a8218b8

Refutation—davidbdale

Help if you need it.

The material I gathered to prepare for this Argument I have moved to a special section of my White Paper to illustrate the value of collecting all my sources in the WP, the repository of all things useful to my Research Position Paper.

What I Refute

My Refutation Argument examines the primary claims of the hypothesis I defended in my Definition Argument, that because polio is fundamentally unlike smallpox—which was eradicated in the 1960s—the differences make it nearly impossible to eradicate polio, ever.

dog-awake

The World Health Organization (WHO) and in particular its Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) have maintained for decades now that the eradication of smallpox strongly argues in favor of the eradicability of polio. They use that analogy to raise $1 billion a year for their efforts. I entirely applaud their audacious enterprise, but I question the quality of their analogy. In 1000 words, I argue that smallpox and polio ARE NOT similar enough for the comparison to hold.

If it sounds ridiculous to devote 1000 words to the OPPOSITE of my own hypothesis, you’re misunderstanding a crucial element of good argument. To persuade skeptics to your point of view, you must address and refute the strongest counterarguments. Ignoring them is fatal. Readers will merely humor you if you try to skirt the best refutations and never change their minds.

  1. My post will be about 1000 words before the References section.
  2. It will use in-text citations WITHOUT parentheses.
    • Please follow this model in your posts as well.
  3. It will use an APA-style References section
    • APA is the new style choice of the Writing Arts Department
    • I made mine for free using BibMe.com
  4. It will PRESENT but also REFUTE strong arguments against my hypothesis. It’s not AN OPPOSITION ARGUMENT, but a CONFIRMATION ARGUMENT that identifies objections to the hypothesis before re-affirming it.
  5. It’s a first draft, so it will embarrass me until I revise it.
  6. Once I revise it, it will be a second draft, still embarrassing but less so.
  7. Questions? Use the Reply field below this post.

Draft Rebuttal

The eradication of smallpox from planet Earth in 1980 by a worldwide immunization campaign raised unrealistic hopes that other diseases could be similarly vanquished. The exuberance of health professionals who set their sights immediately on polio, malaria, and cholera was understandable, but dangerous. If polio were identical to smallpox, the same techniques might suffice to eradicate it next. But if polio is fundamentally different, then the argument from analogy to smallpox fails, and efforts to eradicate polio, based on the argument that “it’s been done before,” could more than just fail; they could backfire catastrophically. The cost of the attempt is enormous, and the risk of failure is very high, so let’s examine the similarities between smallpox and polio and see if they augur success.

Several factors are considered essential to any eradication effort. Christopher Whitty, professor of public and international health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, identifies three. Others may count differently, but if polio and smallpox are sufficiently different in any category essential to eradication to void the comparison, the “did it before” argument will fail. In his Millroy Lecture “Eradication of Disease: Hype, Hope, Reality,” he names as the first pre-requisite: “effective interventions that alone or in combination can interrupt transmission of infection or at least take it well below R0 = 1 in all epidemiological settings.”

As Whitty explains it, R0 = 1 represents the situation where one infected person passes on the disease to just one other person who in turn does the same so that the disease stays stable in the population. At a minimum, then, interventions must exist that can prevent rapid spreading during an outbreak. In the best case, when the R0 can be forced below 1, local elimination and potential eradication can be achieved. For much of the world, local elimination has already been accomplished. In all but a few countries, no new cases of polio have been detected in decades. As described by Ganapathiraju, Morssink, and Plumb in “Endgame for Polio Eradication?“:

in 1955, polio paralysed and killed up to 500,000 people annually worldwide. Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) reduced polio transmission in the USA from 20,000 cases per year in the 1950s to around 1000 cases by the 1960s. [Since then,] polio worldwide has decreased from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to just 416 cases in 2013.

Such remarkable success—a 99.9% reduction in diagnosed cases in 30 years!—continues to encourage eradication advocates, including the Bill Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) that total triumph is inevitable, if not imminent. In fact, seemingly every year, when it solicits funding for its continuing effort, the GPEI announces a “game-changing” or “breakthrough” technology that will once and for all achieve the ultimate victory.

But that victory has so far proved elusive, perhaps because of fundamental differences between smallpox and polio. Again according to Whitty, to be eradicable, “the disease has to be easy to diagnose, preferably with minimal complex laboratory facilities.” But whereas schoolchildren were able to detect the last cases of smallpox among their classmates by casual external observations alone, they would be no help detecting polio, which can persist completely unnoticed in human hosts for decades without causing symptoms.

Fortunately for polio eradication advocates, Whitty’s third essential factor presents no challenge. Polio exists either in human hosts or not at all. There is no significant “wild animal reservoir” for the disease to harbor in between human hosts. But the final ironic difference between the smallpox and polio viruses is that polio uses humans as a sort of “animal reservoir,” and while it persists in unwitting human hosts, often subjected to repeated rounds of immunization efforts, it mutates, emerging as something no longer “wild,” but transformed into a “vaccine-derived virus.”

This last and perhaps most significant difference between smallpox and polio may be the distinction that finally tips public sentiment against spending staggeringly large sums to eliminate a disease that presently afflicts so few. As reported in “The Art of Eradicating Polio” by Leslie Roberts, a Nigerian boy recently voiced the bewilderment of his country in a conversation with Muhammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Health. “Why do they bring only polio vaccine when we get no help with all our other problems? And are you going to force us to take it?” he asked. His question illustrates a reluctance that is increasingly difficult to surmount among populations whose children die by the thousands from diarrhea.

The longer the final stage of eradication drags on the more challenges it faces. Despite impressive successes, and there have been many, setbacks seem maddeningly inevitable. Alwan and Maher report, in 2016, in “Closer to a Polio-Free Eastern Mediterranean Region” that

WHO alone has more than doubled the size of the teams working on polio in the two countries since the start of 2014, and now has nearly 2500 technical and operational experts in the field . . . only 30 cases of polio have been recorded by Pakistan (18 cases) and Afghanistan (12 cases) combined so far in 2016 – a far cry from the 334 cases recorded by these countries in 2014.

Yet, according to Svea Closser’s “We Can’t Give Up Now: Global Health Optimism,” after worldwide spending of nearly $1 billion again in 2016, the fight did not end. Neither did another billion accomplish the goal in 2017. One must ask, as many governments, private foundations, public health professionals, and that Nigerian boy already have, “How much longer can we justify spending so much of our scarce resources on a disease that most of the world has not seen in decades?”

Even success, if it’s achieved, might not be success. As Closser warns us, “When smallpox was declared eradicated, countries could decide independently whether or not to stop vaccinating. For polio, this approach could prove disastrous.” The cheaper OPV vaccines are a double-edged sword. They are favored for mass inoculations and millions of doses are delivered every year, preventing countless cases of polio. But they deploy “weakened live virus strains” that can “evolve to reacquire the ability to cause paralytic disease and to spread. Outbreaks of circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses have occurred before [in 11 countries since 2000]; more are virtually inevitable.”

It’s even possible that vaccine-derived viruses could evolve to mimic the three “wild” polio viruses we’ve taken such pains to eradicate. If that happens, according to Closser, “the gains from interrupting wild polio transmission will be lost; the entire effort will only have succeeded in replacing one set of viruses with another.”

References

Alwan, A., & Maher, C. (2016). Closer to a polio-free Eastern Mediterranean Region. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 22(9), 645-646. doi:10.26719/2016.22.9.645

Closser, S. (2012). We Can’t Give Up Now. Medical Anthropology, 31(5).

Ganapathiraju, P. V., Morssink, C. B., & Plumb, J. (2015). Endgame for polio eradication? Options for overcoming social and political factors in the progress to eradicating polio. Global Public Health, 10(4), 463-473. doi:10.1080/17441692.2014.994655

Roberts, L. (2013, October). The art of eradicating polio. Science, 342(6154).

Whitty, C. J. (2014, August 01). Milroy Lecture: Eradication of Disease: Hype, Hope and Reality. Retrieved March 18, 2018, from http://www.clinmed.rcpjournal.org/content/14/4/419.full