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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

This seems to ignore the (to me) most significant reason to forbid age changing -- many laws involve age.

If I change my age to 12, do airlines have to sell my half price seats, but it becomes illegal for me to buy alcohol and drive? Would it become child pornogrograhy to distribute naked photos of me? Do older photos become retroactively illegal?

If I become legally older, can I start withdrawing a pension?

Maybe we should disconnect age from the legal system, and say no company can ask. But if we did that then there wouldn't be any need to adjust your legal age anyway.

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The laws involving age are exactly the issue here. What if someone has some developmental disorder that strands their body and mind at the developmental age of 12, despite being much older. Should they be able to drink, drive and vote? Should everybody retire at the same age despite differences in health?

It can't hurt to rethink some of those old assumptions. Of course changing your age is a stupid idea. But maybe identifying certain developmental phases and making it possible, in extreme cases, to assign someone to a more appropriate phase, might make it easier for the law to treat them the way they actually are, rather than the way the average person of their age is.

In programmer terms: don't rely on a magic number, but capture what the number means.

The devil is in the details of the implementation, though. If we discard age for a system of "achievement unlocked" style phases, who will be in charge of evaluating and approving these phase decrees? Subjecting an entire population to a potentially capricious bureaucracy to deal with a handful of edge cases seems like swatting flies with a 2x4.

Seems like something for the courts. Most people would still be considered adult at 18 or 21 or whatever, but the few exceptions can have it changed in court.

I'm not saying this is a good idea, just that it's a better idea than changing the actual age number like this article proposes.

Yeah we already do have a somewhat similar mechanism for legal insanity or incompetence to stand trial the two are separate things - technically someone who was so out of it they think their victims they killed were demons wearing human skins and everyone else is crazy for not seeing it and a dementia afflicted serial killer may or may not have been culpable at the time of crime but both aren't suitable to stand trial now.

The implementation is messy and imperfect for those fringe special cases but it is an exeception handler.

We have e.g. legal emancipation in many/most jurisdictions. But just because you may gain the ability to form a binding contract, etc, doesn't mean most people will treat you like you have.

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