Comment by corrral

I feel like there has to be some level of triviality at which the harm is no longer being caused by the attempt to systematize something, but rather by a small group of people refusing to be systematized not out of cultural heritage et al, but rather purely out of the (inane) human desire to feel special by intentionally doing something in a way nobody else does it.

Language and writing exist to communicate, using patterns of signals that have shared meaning and recognition; things like alphabets and vocabularies are effectively (loose, overlapping, diasporic) consensus-state autoencoding models. They only work to compress meaning, when there are rules for said compression that generalize, and which don't have as many exceptions with their own separate symbols as there are words/names needing to be encoded.

Most countries don't allow you to just make up your own novel graphemes when writing a name on a birth certificate. And nobody is asking for that, either. (Presumably because living in a world where that was allowed would be horrible: you'd no longer being able to error-correct when reading, because any given mysterious squiggle in the middle of a word or name, might be exactly what some unknown-to-you-or-anyone-other-than-the-author character is supposed to look like. Is that "o with a curlicue" written here just a semi-cursive attempt at writing an "o" — or is it an "o" with a novel accent marker, one that appears nowhere else, but which must be preserved nevertheless to properly record this person's name?)

Instead, legal names are (in every country I'm aware of) required to be spelled using the character-set of the country you're entering a legal relationship with by being born / immigrating / etc. America? Legal names using the Latin alphabet. Japan? Legal names using characters from this set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiy%C5%8D_kanji

Note, though, that legal names are representations of names. They aren't encodings of names. Your legal name is a distinct thing from your name, just as your credit-card number is a distinct thing from your name. It's an applied-for + registered + assigned systematic identifier for you — a bit like a domain name, or a vanity license-plate number. Which means that your legal name is not a lossy or lossless encoding of your name. It's, per se, a nickname. It doesn't have to have anything to do with your name. (And it often doesn't; immigrants often choose legal names entirely distinct from what they / their home country thinks of as their name.)

> causing harm

> do substantial violence to the "truth"

I don't think this kind of wild escalatory rhetoric is at all helpful to the (presumably) good cause intended. Probably the opposite actually.

Most of the time people are not in fact having substantial harm inflicted upon them by others out to do violence. That mindset seems incredibly fragile, paranoid, and divisive.

The reality is people are just working away to improve things and sometimes they make mistakes or don't have perfect information ahead of time, and other times making things better simply necessitates that not everybody's last whim can always be accommodated. The healthy mindset to have is that not every real or perceived slight against you is done because you are being persecuted by violent hatemongers, and that people should be more accommodating and accepting of the reality that systems and procedures designed for the benefit of everybody may just not be able to accommodate every unique request they have.

And to bureaucratic systems too—governments try to regularize human behavior to make it legible to the state and it can absolutely cause massive harm to people. Seeing like a State makes a great case for this idea; I found it absolutely fascinating.