I can dissect the two fairly easily through example and demonstration keeping the following in mind:

I've never heard of a person just having the knowledge without putting forth an effort via practice, studying up on the job, or looking up how to get gear or what gear should be used for X situation.

Effort Without Knowledge


1. The Hand Me-Down Fever - As it is now more easier to have several jobs levelled, more people are recycling equipment between different jobs.

The hardest piece of gear that BLU has to get is an Epona's Ring, and even that is duoable with laughable difficulty. Almace can be done in 4-5 days or less. There's no excuse besides laziness and non-willingness to gear their job appropriately or lack of understanding as to how. This = lack of skill by definition.
Using the above two items as an example, by the idea of the positive skill correlation between knowledge and effort if you've collected an Almace and Epona's Ring on Blue Mage you have skill for that job. This means it would also have to apply to every job you've yet to play also such as PLD, RDM (melee), MNK, THF, DNC, BST, NIN and so on.

I disagree, and rebute the idea that if one has made the effort on one job that skill is transferrable to every job they play.

2. The Gifted Sensation - As well as having equipment which is transferrable between jobs, it's also very easy to collect equipment for other jobs whilst putting the effort for one. I have AF3+2 materials, equipment and weapons for many other jobs, none of which I use on BLU.

Because of this I once thought I'd give playing MNK a try and had it Cleave Burned to 90, skilled it up to max and started with a 1/3 of my TP build already up to scratch.

I went out to solo in Garliage Citadel and not having a natural cure or stun option led to me getting 1 shotted by an AM2 spell from a ghost. I sucked at it.

My efforts to collect decent equipment for a job I never played contributed very little to the skill I needed to actually play it.

3. Effort Without Knowledge -There are many people who play this game without participating in forum discussion, or all in all even look at the Wiki. I have a friend in game who plays on an Xbox 360, doesn't have a computer and doesn't research any information outside of the game.

His favourite two jobs are BST and WAR and even though he had collected some fantastic gear through our LS, he had no idea how to create different equipment sets, never used macros and just full-timed certain pieces.

How did he collect all those great items without having the know-how? Friends. Other people would tell him whether a mob dropped something for one of his jobs and he'd collect them.

Knowledge without Effort

As much as I feel the above reasons are true they can also be objectively argued against relevantly.

4. Transferrable Skills - If you know how to make a Haste TP build on one job, odds are you're going to be just fine making another on a different job. You don't neccesarily need to have made the effort of collecting the items to have that as a skill.

5. Knowledge without Effort - There are many people in game who put in the effort to collect good gear without the knowledge of how to use it.

As an example, one thing I used to do for many people back in the LV75 era was help Samurai's make 4-6 hit TP builds. There were a lot of people that didn't appreciate that you could change just one piece in a X Hit build and completely mess up your whole approach by carrying redundant +STP.

I myself knew how to make those build's easily, yet never put in any of the effort to collect and use it.

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I think that's enough for a rebuttal against the idea that (Effort:Knowledge) = Skill.