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You cannot gain anything without first giving something in return.
In order to obtain, something of equal value must be lost.
Based off of the anime, Full Metal Alchemist, this thread is about the Law of Equivalent Trade.
Do you think that it exists in our world?
Don't just give examples on possible things that could happen to prove/disprove this theory. To make this more interesting, talk about your own personal past experiences that prove or disprove the law.
Can I instead talk about how many times I creamed myself while watching FMA?
It's just a Anime dude....
Get over it
And I do recall that I deleted a thread EXACTLY like this one a while ago, didn't you take the hint?
What's wrong with it?
Honestly, what am i doing wrong? This is general discussion. I just want to have a discussion about it. If you don't want to talk about it, why not just click the back button and let the people who want to talk about it, talk about it? =/
yeah okay....so one day i went to the market an i bought something. i paid the equal value of the drink in money....i gained through equivalent trade it works i win i proved it works NANNY NANNY BOO BOO....this is a pointless thread theres nothing to talk about it its the law that everyone follows because it cant be escaped so no matter what you do you either lose or gain equally think about it with what little mind you have...
I deleted it because you were openly flamed to death on it and the topic in which you tryed to put across lacked much of what a good discussion would involve.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mizuchi
If your talking about "Karma", then say so. Other wise you make yourself out to be a kid looking for some weak minded discussion on if something from a anime exists in the real world.
Probably one strong reason why these forums appeal to the kind of people frequenting them is the low amount of sheer and naked fanboyism. This topic would fall under that category, though, like DF pretty much said in other words.
I don't think you should censor people just because their thread is dumb. It might have actually had a chance at a discussion had Deadfire not come in and shit all over it. Quit being a wanker.
i agree with mage.Quote:
Originally Posted by mage
No, of course it does not exist. Have you not heard of The Law of Conservation of Mass?
and all those times I got ripped off....
The law of conservation of mass states that the mass of a closed system of substances will remain constant, regardless of the processes acting inside the system.Quote:
Originally Posted by darkmetal505
That has nothing to do with The Law of Equivalent Trade
getting definitions off of wikipedia doesn't help either. Nothing can be made or destroyed, thus how are you supposed to give and recieve the same "whatever". I dunno, it makes sense to me, or maybe I'm trying to sound smart.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mizuchi
I believe that the principle of Equivalent Exchange does indeed exist in this world of ours.
In fact, I wouldn't have been able to read and respond to this thread without expending 2 minutes of my time!
FMA's "Equivalent Exchange" is closer to the first law of thermodynamics: in a closed system, entropy always increases.
However, it's not a valid metaphor for a lot of things in life, and isn't an ironclad law for the way in which the world works.
Economics considers trade in one of two paradigms: the zero-sum game and the nonzero-sum game. In a zero-sum game, for someone to win, someone else has to lose. This is the idea that toka-kokan is based on, and is grounded in the idea that value is an absolute.
Modern economics recognizes that value is NOT absolute, not an intrinsic property of an object, and thus that the value I ascribe to something can be substantially different than your evaluation of the same thing. If I can find something of yours that has little value to you but great value to me, and you can do the same for me, we can exchange them and both achieve a net gain in value. This is a positive-sum game, and is the foundation of liberal economics (free markets, capitalism as a whole).
In the world, there are zero-sum, positive-sum, and negative-sum situations. Wars of attrition are pretty much never positive-sum: even with a low value to human life, the mere economic cost of such a war is often heavier than the benefits associated with winning it. Free markets are positive-sum, and universal conservation of mass-energy is a zero-sum situation. Saying that any one paradigm defines all given circumstances is patently incorrect.
Incidentally, FMA addresses this towards the end, questioning toka-kokan and its veracity. In the case of human-conjuring, the 'game' was very clearly negative-sum. In the case of other alchemy, it was positive-sum (ie: you got order for free by practicing alchemy, it was essentially free energy).
Although that was a very good post, I was going for something along the lines of past personal experiences. Not like, I bought a tomato for 25 cents. Something more personal. Like maybe something that affected your life in a good or bad way? If you dont seem to have anything then don't post. But if you can recall anything that goes along the lines of or against equivalency then post here.Quote:
Originally Posted by complich8
I'll give an example of something from my life that I don't know the answer to yet. Last year I started learning how to play tennis. Since about 6 months ago, I have started to get serious about the game and have been training really hard to become better. Tomorrow afternoon I have my first tournament. So tomorrow I will see how I do in the tournament and if equivalency worked for me.
.........Quote:
Originally Posted by Mizuchi
lol?
Please dude, use your words. Contentless posts are exactly why DF wanted to close threads like this one...
If you don't have anything significant to say or if you're not gonna follow the rules of the thread, don't post.
-m
so you're saying you ... want to keep the thread at the shallowest possible level?
Meh, whatever... I'm already getting bored with it :p. Clearly it doesn't work for me: I have traded my perspective and time for what amounts to "no, I mean don't think about things in any sort of depth." I certainly don't consider these to be of equivalent value ... I haven't even gotten entertainment value back!
It does work compy, just that you don't nessecarily get the benefit, but your effort did create benefit in the world, namely benefiting me by letting me laugh at Mizuchi that much more efficiently.Quote:
Originally Posted by complich8
Quote:
Originally Posted by mage
i think this topic is a viable one, but basing it on a theme from an anime makes it very slippery. You can take this seriously, or you can say, "Dude I watched FMA twice and i still don't fucking know what Equivalent Trade is exactly". I elect to do both.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mizuchi
it was left very unclear (at least to me) at the end of the anime FMA series, how exactly the whole setup of Equivalent Trade worked. Maybe I'm just easily confused, but I felt like there were times it was applied and others it wasn't (therby not makeingit a Law of any kind)...
as for karma and dharma and all that stuff. I have one thing to say: If this don't help explain it all, nothing will
so, yeah, let this topic stay open and let people not swurve off of it
I subscribe to what's called the "sawdust" philosphy. This has a little to do with Thermaldynamics, but it's over-simplified.
Let's say that you have a four-foot-long board, and you want to have two two-foot-long boards. By sawing the board in half you "exchange" the single four-foot-long board for the two two-foot-long boards. But wait, there's a problem: when you measure your boards you realize that you have two boards that only measure One foot, eleven and three quarter inches.
After you get done swearing you realize what happened to the extra wood: sawdust. You always lose something in the transfer. You can try to lose less by using a thinner blade, but you can't ever come out quite even. No matter what you do, you're screwed.
I think that the idea from FMA is pretty shallow in itself. It states that something of a certain VALUE must be given up to gain something else of an equal VALUE. Yet, how does one go about determining this VALUE? The Value of things is not a universal standard. Value itself can be based on several different things such as emotions, monetary value, historical importance, etc. For every person, the value of certain things amounts to something else and the whole idea of value becomes relative. If this is the case, then every character in FMA must have their own approach to alchemy. Not everyone needs to give up the same things to gain something else. Then, there must be a huge number of ways in which to gain the same thing. Hence the equivalence of two things also becomes a relative property. Then how does one look at equivalence in the universal scheme of things.
(I can't believe i just brought relativity into the whole thing! What am i doing in this thread anyways??)
Well, I thought I might as well add my thoughts to this discussion. It's been a while since I've seen FMA, so please bear with me if I get my facts about the show mixed up.
It seems to me that FMA deals with the Law of Equivalent Trade as a scientific principle relating to alchemy. It doesn't seem to me as though they try to extend it beyond alchemy to a Law governing all of life. They do try to brave the tricky business of assigning value to human life, however. This is a daunting task indeed, and perhaps should be left for a different discussion altogether.
However, you asked for examples from personal experience, so I shall oblige you. Let me go back to your tennis example. You are equating the time and effort you put in practicing to the acquired skill you gain at the end. It is commonly known that I don't have very good coordination. Gym class was the bane of my existence in highschool, especially when we were graded on our accuracy. I remember this unit we did on volleyball, where the test at the end required serving the ball into a hula hoop laid out on the floor on the opposite side of the net. Volleyball is a sport I really enjoy, so I was determined that I was going to do well on this test. I practiced for hours. I practiced tons more than the other kids, putting in way more time and effort. In the end, there were those who achieved better scores with much less effort than I. It's not equivalent. I had to give up far more than the others to gain the same amount.
Splash made especially good remarks about why value cannot be measured, too. Value is an abstract concept, an invention of the human mind. It's not like physical properties such as mass and density. Without humans, there would be no value, because it only exists in our mind. Thus, we can change the value of things at will. In such an environment, equivalent trade cannot exist as a law.
Whoa.....that line definitely reminds me of a point they've tried to make near the end of FMA.Quote:
Originally Posted by KitKat
I think with Lyra and the baby....
Sort of like the rock lee/neji situation. Lee practiced far more, and worked many times harder and still could not defeat neji, simply because neji was born with an advantage.
I can't decide myself if it exists or not.
1. Today at the tournament, I lost in the preliminaries to a small indian kid about 2 years younger than me, and about 2 feet shorter than me. I'm sure i've worked many more hours and sweat much more than he has, yet I still lost. Where is the equivalency in that?
2. The equivalency might not be per individual, but maybe per clan. Although I've worked much harder than he has, his family was able to afford professional coaches and indoor courts so that he could get better easier. The equivalency is that his parents work to gain that money reflected on their kid who got the benefit of it, while being lower middle class myself had no coaches and just played hours and hours of tennis trying very hard to get better.
So I think that equivalency exists, even if not for 1 individual, it happens per groups. If you put work into something, maybe you won't acheive much from it, but someone close to you will.
=/
very true. The amount of work it will take to achieve something differs from person to person. It seems, however, that almost anything that one person can do, can be achieved by others depending on how much effort is put into it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mizuchi
you're ridiculous........
are you compromising that a little kid countered your hard work at training for tennis by his parent's hard work in the business world?
Do you have any proof that this indian kid hasn't actually practiced more than you?Quote:
Originally Posted by Mizuchi
Also, Neji is also a damn hard worker.
I am an awful role-model.
I didn't do an ounce of revision for my GCSE exams, and yet I came out of them with good enough grades to get into a pretty swish college.
I certainly don't beleive that I put in enough work to earn those result, but I got them anyway by virtue of my being able to think logically, while other people who worked their backsides off revising came out with poor grades.
On the other hand, I used to work for a government contractor, on a contract from the UK Hydrographic Office. My collegues and I put 110% into the contract, and as a reward for our efforts, we found ourselves out of work when we'd finished the contract.
Equivalent trade does exist in the world, but generally, it's subsumed by principal of acquisition.
It's more preferable to get something for nothing, than it is to get something through equivalent trade.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Terracosmo
No solid proof, but he did have many friends in the stands cheering for him every time he did sumthing really bad or really good. I on the other hand haven't hung out with my friends for months so i could spend most of my day on tennis.
Im not saying he didn't work hard (comparing to neji)
Im just saying I worked a lot harder but with less effects (comparing to lee)
@Mizuchi: You have no idea what this kid did, you only know that he had a lot of support at the match. Here's some pure speculation on the situation....His friends could have been his family. Indian's (if he was even Indian) tend to have large families that are close knit so maybe a bunch of his cousins came to support him.
And as to you losing...you lost. I assume that you are a competnet Tennis player and not just some shmuck who picked up a racket. Therefore countless tiny situations all conspired togeather to make you lose, he just hit the ball somewhere you couldn't get to it more than you could. Some of that is skill and some of it is luck, but there are no grounds for you to think that somehow all your preparations should guarantee the outcome you desire, regardless of how much he may or may not have practiced.
To bring this back into the Equivalent Exchange principle you could have still gotten something from the match even though you didn't get what you wanted (a victory). If you learned something new then that is the fruit of your effort. If all you gained was bitterness and an emo outlook on Indian kids who are better than you at tennis then that is what you gained. While the idea of value is pretty much bogus in a universal sense, the rule that every action has a reaction tends to apply beyond the realm of physics. You worked and practiced and played a match, and now you are different than before you played the match, maybe you aren't a Tennis champion now, but all of your experiances combine to shape you into who you are, that is the exchange.
Although there is lots of discussion about exchange, the point of this is whether Equivalent Exchange exists. Most things in this world have a certain cost associated with them. Often that cost will be our basis of evaluation as to whether we want to attain that thing. Maybe being good at tennis seems like a goal worth your time and effort to you, but as for me, I wouldn't be caught dead practicing that much for a sport I find so boring. Other things have consequences, sometimes that we don't expect, which can be a cost we didn't take into consideration. Perhaps with all the time you spent practicing tennis, your friends stopped inviting you to social events. This is a consequence you probably wouldn't have anticipated at the beginning. And then there is a principle of sacrifice, where we willingly give up something in order to have a chance at gaining something else. This doesn't always work out, and sometimes our sacrifices can be in vain. There is no doubt that these things exist. We've seen them all in our lives.
Equivalent Exchange, as was mentioned above, requires an absolute and universal value to be assigned to everything. How can you tell if the exchange is equivalent? Well, you can't! The exchanges we make are very often not equivalent. To give a very superficial example, you might pay $20 for a pizza from a new pizza place and find out that their pizza is disgusting, when you could have had a $10 pizza that's a lot better from the place you usually order from. And believe me, it's a lot easier to try to assign value to something like a pizza than to something like a friendship. If you still think equivalent exchange exists, re-read splash's discussion of value. Unless you can dispute that, you will not be able to lay any grounds for the existence of Equivalent Exchange.
Well I didn't want to get involved with this but I'll offer my opinion. I will have to disagree with you, Kitkat; there is no need to refute splash's ideas of value. If value was absolute it would negate equivalent exchange, but rather relative value is what makes it plausible. Your pizza example is a great example of relative value. When you bought the pizza it was in your value worth $20, to the pizza maker it was also worth $20 thus an exchange is made. However, then you had an experience, eating the pizza, which changed your value of the pizza. You now value the pizza at $10 so you won't pay $20 for it again.
Now I am not saying equivalent exchange is fact as it is poorly defined in this argument. If you limit equivalent exchange to micro events then I can make arguments for both sides, if you define it in a broad macro series of events then it gets vague and everything becomes speculation. For example, if I define equivalent exchange as being limited to one event and that event must be equal then I could argue that if I gave a homeless person $20 then that $20 is more valuable to them then it is to me. If I define it in that the sum of all events that occur will be equal then I could say that my grandfather came over to America and worked real hard which in turn my father had to work a little less and I in turn even less, while say that random homeless person's grandfather came over and didn't work as hard and so his father had to in turn work a little harder and so on. It is based on belief and will vary as the definition. Just as if you were to ask everyone if God exists, well say maybe 50% say yes, then as your definition of God changes so does opinions. Basically what I am saying is it is useless! :)
I'm not sure if I completely understand what you're saying Apraxhren. Do you think you could clarify? Are you saying that because value is relative that the value of each event becomes the value that will balance things and and make everything equivalent?
I see your point about looking at things in a micro sense and a macro sense though. There are a lot of events which lead to or influence other events which may be unknown. I did an activity once, where we were given a scenario of a family living in a developing country, and we had to write on a paper all the root causes of poverty. In the end, we had a giant paper covered in a web of interconnected events and factors, and it was doubtful that we managed to identify every factor that contributed to the situation. To look at Equivalent Exchange in a truly macro sense, well, that would require being able to evaluate the entirety of the human race over all of time. Certainly not a task we could accomplish.
I think though, from what I'm hearing from Mizuchi's posts, he's referring to a more discrete and micro-oriented sense of Equivalent Exchange.
In a way, that is an argument one could use who was trying to prove that equivalent trade is a fact. I was commenting on the part when you said equivalent exchange requires an absolute value assigned to everything. I was merely trying to say that equivalent exchange could possibly exist without absolute values, in line with splash's relative value post.Quote:
I'm not sure if I completely understand what you're saying Apraxhren. Do you think you could clarify? Are you saying that because value is relative that the value of each event becomes the value that will balance things and and make everything equivalent?
Well, I guess you could say that, but it complicates things in that each object or event has an infinite possibility of values it could be, and at any one time, it may have multiple values simultaneously. How do you equate something that at any point in time exists in several or even infinitely many different states?
While I'm not an expert, I beleive Richard Feynman suggested something along those lines.
We only experience the most likely state.
It is actually more than possible for the value of something to exist in around 6.8 billion states.
I have a cafetierre on my desk.
To me, it's pretty valuable; it allows me to prepare good coffee for myself, makes the room smell nice, and is something that is mine.
To you, well, you probably couldn't care less about the cafetierre. It doesn't get you coffee, it doesn't make your rom smell nice, and it certainly isn't yours (mine!).
The only value it could plausibly hold for you is related to the effect it has on me (I'm a better person for having my coffee), but it the long run, I could smash it to bits and you wouldn't feel any sense of loss.
You would probably be happy to exchange my cafetierre for a peice of lint, and consider it a fair exchange, because it had no value to you to begin with. Whereas I would not.
Thye moral of this story is that I like my cafetierre.
Hmm.....
Heres my thoughts on the subject!:eek: Use your goddamned common sense to judge the value of something! Equivalent exchange obviously exists because you can't tell me you've never had an experience involving it. But with people everywhere tring to make money, equivalent exchange is rarly seen nowadays.
Theres absolutly no point in asking if it exists or not. We all know it does. ("Sometimes")
My two cents.................
But........I'll let you guys get on with your disccusion. =P
But, in the case of buying something, the item has an asking price.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lucifus
If the item isn't worth the asking price to you, in any way, then you wouldn't buy it. Thus, skewed as it may seem, this is equivalence.
You might buy it if you need it, or if you think you need it. You might pay several times more than what it costs to preoduce the item, especially in a tightly controlled market.
For instance, some people really love birds. Such a person might convince herself that she "needs" a parrot after seeing one in a pet store. After deciding what kind of parrot she wants, she shops around and finds that the lowest price available is a few hundred dollars. She pays this amount for a young parrot whose feathers have not fully come in yet. After taking home the bird she can't figure out why he keeps on singing spanish lullabies.
The distributor who sold that parrot to the pet store goes to the Costa Rican Rain forest every year. In the Spring time the native people who still live in the forest (yes, they're still there) climb trees and snatch baby birds from the nests. These hatchling are taken home and the women of the tribe take care of the birds along with the children, often singing them lullabies in Spanish and Portuguese. When the distributor comes in the Fall he trades for the young birds. The native people can recieve a knife, a bell, or even a cord of fabric for each bird.
The distributor then takes the birds back to the US. He slips the customs agent a hundred dollar bill, and sells each bird for three hundred to seven hundred dollards. The woman who bought that bird had no idea that her bird only cost the distributor a twelve dollar knife. If she ever found out she wouldn't consider it equivalent anymore.
So, this boils down to us not being deep enough to understand Mizuchi's advanced layer of thinking?
Poor birdies:(
The actual dollar-value attached to the item, and the personal value we attach to the item, are largely independant.
That we are willing to pay the price of something indicates that we consider the item to be at least worth that much. If we didn't, on some level, cosider the cost to be reasonable, then we wouldn't pay it.
In this day and age,
1 red paperclip = 1 house
Equivalence? Yes, indeed!
Ha, that's too true dude.
Btw, your new sig is more than a little creepy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by samsonlonghair
I think the common mistake on this thread is that many people think that equivalent exchange only refers to trading or buying something. That's not the point of the thread. What I'm looking for is something that you yourself or someone close to you has done to affect or not affect your or someone else (besides paying or trading).
When you buy or trade something, you or someone else came up with the value for the item. The equivalency that I'm looking for is experiences that you or anyone else can't put prices on.
Thats what I mean by equivalency, not things you price yourself.
discuss.
***EDITED****
That doesn't sound like equivalency to me...it sounds like conservation. Tae dad did a lot of work and learnd a great deal, then instead of all the fruits of his effort (knowledge) vanishing from the world, they were recorded in a diary, which was found and acted upon by another. The guy worked hard and learned a lot, and the someone else learned what he had learned with out doing any work. What does that have to do with EE? The work/learn thing is more cause and effect then anything else.
Ur right yukimura, i edited it. I'll put in a new example when I think of one.
P.S. Whatever idiot bad repped me because if the bad example is a complete moron. I made a mistake and the example was bad, but I corrected it and thats no reason to neg rep me. Idiot.
You're some kind of nut, right? or you didnt pay attention to chem class? the Law of Conservation only works in a closed system whereas external elements or factors do not affect the system as a whole. Rearraanging the molecules and particles may sound appealing, but in this way, ENERGY WILL NOT BE GIVEN OFF. Nothing can be made or destroyed, eh? so you do not understand the law at all.Quote:
Originally Posted by darkmetal505
so, when i burn a piece of paper, it turns to ashes. no change? NO. there may be ashes, your so called "Nothing can be made or destroyed," , only the composition is changed. TOTALLY WRONG! fire is made at the process, right? so it expanded energy. so, the volume of the paper and its ashes are NOT THE SAME ANYMORE. due to chemical change.
Great first post to necro a thread from 2 and a half years ago.
I miss Mizuchi.
Why isn't he unbanned already? Last time I heard he was only banned for a month after an uncalled-for-flame directed at Animeniax.
Banned for flaming Animeniax?
LOLWUT
http://forums.gotwoot.net/showthread...9&postcount=29Quote:
Originally Posted by Mizuchi
...............Flaming Animeniax = Permanent BanQuote:
Originally Posted by BoC
.................The Law of Inequivalent Trade
There's an entire back story to this that none of you are privy to. Unfortunately as a condition of me not being banned as well, I'm not allowed to discuss it.
If alchemy is understanding, decomposing, and recomposing...
And if Flaming Animeniax = Permanent ban....
Then does Banning Animeniax = Permanent Flaming?