This is a very cool query tool that I haven't seen before, thanks! (Also the syntax drives me a little batty).
I tried modifying it to give me authors whose first publication (any publication at all) happened after 60 years old, but also who had at least one wdt:P800 work. I got people like Cato the Elder, Josephus, and William of Tyre.
I tried again for only people born in the 20th century, and I got some results (plus quite a bit of wrong answers, presumably something about the query or data)! Oddly quite a few of the results are from criminals who wrote an autobiography after their release, including Henri Charrière and the infamous Nazi, Albert Speer.
OfirMarom 1 days ago [-]
This is actually very awesome. Had no idea about this.
tantalor 1 days ago [-]
Can you filter by "major works only"?
FelipeCortez 1 days ago [-]
that's kind of what P800 (notable work) is doing, but you can try some approximations to "major work" with "has both an English Wikipedia page and a Goodreads link":
> asked LLMs to compile list of 10-20 writers considered canon in each decade since 1800, then identify all their notable works and years of publication. After some iterations with coding agents I got over 2,000 works by 200 authors.
Wait, so the source data is just LLM hallucinations? It makes sense to use an LLM to build the data collection, but not to build your source data.
cowboylowrez 23 hours ago [-]
This is in my opinion a better use of tech that has an error rate (hallucination), you just assume that its a fuzzy search, and sample the results to see how you did. I'd like to see a few from the results for sure!
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
LLMs cite. So hope they did their due diligence.
ijk 1 days ago [-]
It feels a lot like storing your data as an essay in a Word doc instead of a spreadsheet. It can work and all of the math is probably correct, but it's very much the wrong tool when the structured data was right there to be used instead.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
The structure data is scattered all over the place. This does the very important thing of aggregating them, and bringing them together. If you had to manually do that it could take weeks.
Retric 1 days ago [-]
What’s the point of getting the wrong answer quickly?
Well, we’re just going in circles now. I just said LLMs cite what they find so it’s not going to be the wrong answer if you do your due diligence.
xorcist 3 hours ago [-]
Isn't verifying sources a much harder problem than just searching the list of works in the first place?
Especially in cases such as this. For well known works of literature and music structured data exists already.
Retric 23 hours ago [-]
Missing entries don’t get corrected by looking at the LLM output. That only helps when the LLM makes something up from thin air or mangles the output.
Of course it’s not the kind of question you can get an objectively correct answer for, but you could come up with the correct answer for a given methodology.
uoaei 1 days ago [-]
Do extra work in step 2 because you got lazy in step 1 is not my idea of efficient or complete.
NetMageSCW 23 hours ago [-]
It’s a long way from got lazy to didn’t write their own Internet scraper to scan for books, author’s age and opinions.
bryanrasmussen 23 hours ago [-]
that depends how much more quickly and efficiently you can do the extra work in step 2 than in step 1.
Retric 23 hours ago [-]
In this case it’s strictly less efficient.
You can only correct for missing entries by doing the same work you’d need to start from scratch. But after that you now have a second list to consider.
1 days ago [-]
Ajedi32 1 days ago [-]
What do you mean by due diligence here? Manually checking 2000 citations sounds a lot harder to me than just pulling the data from a reliable source to start with.
mellosouls 1 days ago [-]
I think this is pretty common across different creative forms albeit with different age ranges but constrained at the higher end.
So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.
Literature (esp novels) seems to occupy an older range, perhaps 30s to 50s. Perhaps classical music and philosophy also? I don't know about the visual arts.
I interpret it as the former requiring the creative fireworks of youthful neural elasticity and the latter the depth we associate with lived experience and wisdom.
Naturally there are outliers (general relativity in Einstein's early 30s, Shakespeare word play till his late 40s) but I think in general these rules of thumb seem to be a good guide for the very highest achievers and for the most creative periods for us mere mortals.
Mediocrity of course is unconstrained by age.
somenameforme 1 days ago [-]
I think a lot is driven by environmental rather than genetic factors. For instance the article mentions that both The Road, and No Country for Old Men were written when Cormack was in his 70s. But very few people in their 70s are even trying to write, let alone get published.
I think there's something similar in chess where players tend to peak around their mid to late 30s. But a major issue there is that that's also the age that most players are having children and developing ever more interests. And they're competing against the younger generation which is still dedicating 100% of their life, and time, to chess. Absent some monumental edge, that's a battle you're going to inevitably lose - even if aging factors did not exist.
Morromist 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah. there is some obvious logic that one can use here without having to look at data.
Not everyone survives to write to an old age.
Old people have health problems that can prevent them from work, like going blind.
People who write a great work at an old age will not have the time and energy to do all the non-writing parts of making the great work seen by readers - which has always been a big part of writing. Like getting their book in bookstores, advertising it, etc.
If someone is a very talented writer they are likely to write great stuff before they get old and may spend their old age preening and working on their legacy instead of new works. They will already know they're a great writer, so the drive to make another great work is lessened.
If someone is already an accomplished writer more of their time will be taken up with invitations to speak, being on award panels, doing interviews, writing introductions.
There is less financial incentive to write a great work when you're very old.
It is harder to be part of a literary salon full of smart people that help you grow your creativity when you're very old.
As people grow older they become more alienated from the zeitgeist and are better at connecting with their own generation.
zulux 1 days ago [-]
Sort of confirm: I'm older, and my mind is fine, I just don't care as much anymore. I'm comfortably numb as the song goes.
jebarker 16 hours ago [-]
What do you think caused you to stop caring as much? I’ve been becoming more aware of my finitude recently for a variety of reasons relating to middle-age and having kids. A side effect of that is definitely caring less about lots of things in order to focus on others. But I have an internal battle going on with the part of me that says I should still be ambitious and make a dent in the world.
somenameforme 8 hours ago [-]
For me at least you hit exactly on it - shifting priorities. I never imagined how quickly life flies by, and it only seems to move even faster as we grow more grey, so my interest has become more on my children and basically turning them into 'little mes', but ideally even better. Then they can have their go at the same game with some better guidance.
Everything we personally do will mostly be forgotten in short order in basically all cases. Even the exceptions do little more than stretch out the timeline by a bit. Jeff Bezos of tomorrow will be the John Astor of today; many, if not most, young developers have never even heard of John Carmack. The only real legacy we can ever truly have is our children, because they will be the humanity of tomorrow.
randomNumber7 22 hours ago [-]
It's very clear from looking at chess, but also e.g. online gaming and sports that people in their 20s have the strongest cognitive capabilities, especially "processing speed".
But on the other hand, the world is very complicated and you can't know much in your 20s.
I'm today a much better programmer than 10 years ago, even with slightly less brains.
You are not going to write an impactfull novel without live experience.
How that declines varies and some people still have most cognitive capabilities in their 70s.
Imustaskforhelp 1 days ago [-]
100% true about chess but I think there's more nuance to it.
In 6th grade, I had gone to a chess coach who were a friend of my father (technically my father knew his father very well). It was my birthday/a day close to it IIRC and I wanted to learn chess. He was an international-master (or close to it) /National-master (I think he just had one norm less) and he told me about his story and everything, but he said that in a way, he does feel like if he had put the efforts within something like finance for example, he really could earn more than 10 times the money but he said that he really loved chess with a passion. I think that is another element and I think he was within his 30's. Not everyone makes it even that big within chess aside from a very few at the top
You are sort of right in the manner that, as teens grow and the focus of life/dedication from teenage years on solely getting good at chess, diversifies into for example relationships/money-aspects, the mind simply doesn't have enough competition to play chess Comparing this to a 18 year old or 17 year old who just wants to get best at chess and doesn't really want anything else other than chess with their complete and utter dedication.
(There is also another theory recently within Chess of the pressures of being the world champion, from Ding Liren to Gukesh, both have faced tremendous losses after being the best, Gukesh has even lost 75 points after being the world champion, which I believe also has to be because of how many eyes/the pressure building up)
I still like playing chess but all of this makes me also appreciate all the chess players as well in a bit-more behind the scenes manner too. At professional level, calling it taxing sport mentally might even be a bit of an understatement especially for the people within their 30's.
another thing I personally like about Ding and Gukesh both is that they are both humble. They might win or lose but with the brief time that they both had/will have the crown is with their own humbleness. I really like them both a lot. Hope history remembers both their struggles and their humbleness.
randomNumber7 22 hours ago [-]
Magnus Carlsen is still absolutely destroying anyone else in his 30s. By far.
He didn't compete for the world champion becaue he didn't want to put in the effort for the preparation (again). Also it would have been boring if he played it because he would have won again.
He intentionally starts with subobtimal openings at major turnaments because of boredom and still wins.
somenameforme 8 hours ago [-]
Magnus played 5 world chess championships. 2 games he played against the previous generation of players who were already well on their way out, and did phenomenally well. 1 game he played against Nepo in a completely even match until Nepo lost one game and went on his somewhat infamous monkey tilt. The other 2 games were against players of his generation. In the 24 games of those matches he ended up with a score of +1 =22 -1. And he was never the one pressing in the classical matches.
Carlsen's paradoxical because he's undoubtedly the strongest player in contemporary times, if not in the entire history of chess, but his world championship matches have never been particularly impressive. And he thinks that his ability peaked sometime shortly before his match with Nepo. So he probably thinks there's a fairly good chance of him losing if he played another world championship match.
On top of these observations, the one player he was willing to play a world championship match against was Alireza Firouzja. Alireza has an extremely poor record against Magnus, especially in slower time controls, had no experience in the pressures of a world championship match, and Magnus would have been an absurdly huge favorite against him.
In other words, he's not playing a world championship matches because there's a reasonably good chance he spends months of work and effort preparing for it, only to ultimately lose and put that mark on his legacy. Right now it's still perfectly reasonable to call him the GOAT, but if he lost to somebody in a WCC match, that'd now always come with an asterisk.
mna_ 11 hours ago [-]
For the most part, he plays normal openings. If he does play something offbeat, it's because he's trying to avoid prep.
Imustaskforhelp 21 hours ago [-]
Yes, magnus carlsen is a legendary player/the best player right now, there isn't much denying about it.
Regarding boredom, I think that either it was magnus or hikaru who are/were really optimistic about chess960 (randomized chess essentially) because they have less value to openings and more values to the more live-ness of the situation so it has some exciting element to it.
At a certain point for magnus, there really is only enough excitement within classical chess if you are the best players in the world. But he seems excited about chess960
(Edit: you have accidentally made me wonder but would hackernews like a chess club of our community [preferably within lichess]?) https://lichess.org/team/hackernews-chess-club (The password is dang) :]
Edit2: Interestingly, there is already a hackernews-chess-club after searching back on hackernews, https://lichess.org/team/hacker-news, but they had the idea 6 years ago interesting :)
abetusk 1 days ago [-]
I think this is a gross cultural misconception. Most scientists do their best work in their 30s and 40s. See [0].
My take on this is that it takes about a decade before experience, knowledge and wisdom can be used to see a bigger picture to make a breakthrough.
b) there is no breakdown into theoretical vs experimental research, or scientific field; theory I would expect to be over-represented at the younger end especially as the science discipline becomes "harder".
Overall I would say it lends credence to the idea physics is a young person's game at the very highest levels.
abetusk 1 days ago [-]
a) the inflection point is in the high 30s. Further $\int_{40}^{50} f(x) dx > \int_{20}^{30} f(x) dx$.
b) true there is no breakdown but I would expect the exact opposite as fields get harder. More context requires more training and familiarity, which I would expect to increase age.
My point is that I think there's a bias in the field towards the youth narrative but the majority of discovery, even in physics, happens at a later age.
kcexn 15 hours ago [-]
I don't think there is a bias in the field towards a youth narrative. I think there is a bias in the media.
Nobody I've ever met would expect a breakthrough from a 20 something year old no matter how much of a genius they are. Communicating a breakthrough requires time, effort, and credibility to begin with, which nobody has at that age.
Your 30's are when you can start to really do great things. And then depending on the field you can kind of just keep going as long as you have the energy for it. But lots of people begin to wear out into their 40's (for lots of different reasons).
In terms of great breakthroughs. If you haven't had your great idea by 40. It's probably increasingly unlikely that you'll have one later in life (but not impossible). Not everyone needs to have a paradigm changing idea to have a successful career though.
tgv 1 days ago [-]
The best works of Bach and Beethoven are from later in their life, although neither lived to be 85 (65 and 57, respectively), and also wrote great works in their younger years. Bruckner kept improving with age. There are also composers who lost it at a later age: Ravel, famously. Classical music is difficult, so experience does allow a better overall view, something which a lot of short works (such as pop songs) don't need.
MyHonestOpinon 1 days ago [-]
If I remember correctly. Bach had about 20 children and he dedicated a lot of his time to their education. A few became very successful musicians. It is an example than later in life a lot of our value is not so much on doing, but helping form the new generations.
IAmBroom 1 days ago [-]
Ravel wrote his most famous work, Bolero, after age 50, and suffered a traumatic head injury a few years later. Not a good example, except perhaps that the odds of bad things happening increase with longevity.
tgv 1 days ago [-]
He wasn't happy with the Bolero, and it certainly wasn't his best work. The piano concerto in G was also late, and that's definitely better. I didn't know about the head trauma.
bee_rider 1 days ago [-]
On the bright side, most of us were never candidates for inventing relativity, really. I wonder if our mediocrity remains stable, of if we lose a proportional amount of capability as the luminaries did.
sunrunner 1 days ago [-]
I'll have you know my mediocrity is directly proportional to my age.
bee_rider 1 days ago [-]
Probably sigmoids
antisthenes 1 days ago [-]
I've reverted to the mean more times than I can count!
TimPC 1 days ago [-]
I think pop musicians are capable of doing greater works later, but the perception of pop works are so heavily influenced by the image/presentation of the artist that we view the works as lesser. I don't think there is something fundamentally different about pop music that leads to best works being earlier relative to other genres of music beyond that.
quesera 1 days ago [-]
A great deal of pop music, performed by teens-20yos, is written and produced by seasoned professionals who are in their 30s-40s-50s.
The exceptions to that pattern are remarkable.
musictubes 1 days ago [-]
If we limit the definition of pop music to what charts I think it makes all the sense in the world that it is a young person’s game. So much of what drives chart success is what is in fashion at the time. Trend setting will always be the domain of youngsters.
If we expand the definition of pop music to all music that isn’t classical/jazz/experimental, etc. then older, more experienced musicians should be able to do quite well. Frank Sinatra honed his craft over the decades. I think the stuff he did in his 40s and 50s is probably his best.
bsder 18 hours ago [-]
> So much of what drives chart success is what is in fashion at the time. Trend setting will always be the domain of youngsters.
I would suggest it's more the demands of poverty that make it a young person's game. So, so, so many pop musicians were "I was living in squalor for a decade plus was extremely depressed and was about to hang it up when <thing happened> and we got popular." Huey Lewis, Annie Lennox, ... I can go on and on.
There was a metal artist that was being interviewed about when they were going to tour again and was "Yeah, we'll consider it. But I've got a lot of work at my tattoo business right now." There was another guy that was like "Yeah, had this fame hit in our 20s this would be nice but in our late 30s it isn't really useful. We figured out how to do life by now, and we're not going to disrupt that."
elcapitan 1 days ago [-]
> I interpret it as the former requiring the creative fireworks of youthful neural elasticity and the latter the depth we associate with lived experience and wisdom.
That being said, I think an interesting factor would also be which of those who wrote major works in their later age already did a decent amount of writing in their earlier years. Even if you have life experience, I would imagine that you will have to build up the "muscle memory" of writing skills in your more elastic years (e.g. by becoming a successful writer after a lifetime of journalistic work or just minor literary works).
allturtles 1 days ago [-]
Yeah there are quite a few exceptions to this. I've been (re-)reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and two of the four people directly involved in the discovery and explanation of nuclear fission were 60 (Hahn and Meitner) the other two (Frisch and Strassman) were in their mid-to-late 30s. Shortly after, Bohr (53) figured out that the oddities of uranium's fission behavior were due to the different activation energies of U-235 and U-238.
I think the best place to look for major works late in life is probably historical writing, which calls for accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Looking at the four most recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize in history from 2023-2025 [0], all appear to be north of 50 based on their Wikipedia pages (which give dates of education if not dates of birth), and one is in her 70s [1].
> So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.
I can, just from feeling, agree to the pop music. About math I would cite the example of Gilbert Strang, who made many books at advanced age, including one at age 86 or other publications well over the 70s. Another example (well not math, but CS) Donald Knuth. I do not know how is the whole statistic, but writing good books, even text books, does not seem to be teenager thing.
HappyPanacea 1 days ago [-]
Serre is known for being active in old age as well
sp527 1 days ago [-]
> So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.
I think there's a chance this is itself a type of selection bias, because you're over-indexing on the famous. And fame has consequences.
Many music artists end up trapped by their own fame (and attendant expectations) and fail to update themselves over time, thus falling out of the limelight. But there are plenty who defy this trend. Tiesto, David Guetta, Kaskade, and Armin van Buuren in EDM, for example. Coldplay is another great example. Love them or hate them, they're still putting out chart toppers.
Something similar is true for scientists in my opinion. I think Richard Hamming had the most incisive analysis of this in 'You and Your Research' [1], which is worth reading in its entirety.
> But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.
> When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
My view is that fatalistically assuming that age is an obstacle to creative output obscures the hidden variables that are genuinely determinative.
I think there's a chance this is itself a type of selection bias, because you're over-indexing on the famous
Not in this case, no, at least as far as the music goes.
My user-name here is taken from a Northern Soul record as its the music that means the most to me. The genre is obscure almost by definition.
I would guesstimate the proportion of the hundreds (thousands?) of records so classified and celebrated made by people under 30 to be over 95% and that correlates with my (admittedly subjective) experience of the best music of other pop genres.
ralferoo 1 days ago [-]
(complete sidetrack)
I think this graph is a great illustration about how anonymising data is hard. It's very easy to isolate individual authors from this list, because there are clear diagonal lines because the year and age are increasing in lockstep. This also suggests there aren't actually that many authors in this collection, because of these strong diagonals everywhere.
There's probably also some erroneous data here with a bunch of points representing material written by people at age 34 between about 1920 and 1940 (an obvious horizontal line) when most of the rest of the graph doesn't show any strong horizontal bias for a specific age.
Gander5739 1 days ago [-]
> This also suggests there aren't actually that many authors in this collection
There are 200 according to the website.
rjtavares 1 days ago [-]
Opened it just to check if Saramago was there, and indeed, he is.
For most of his professional life he was a journalist. He published his second novel at 55, only found his narrative style at almost 60, then wrote 15 novels (and won a Nobel) after that. What an amazing career.
keiferski 1 days ago [-]
It’s difficult to be a truly interesting person with a unique perspective on life, and have the skills to transmute that experience into a work of art, when you’re young. You simply haven’t logged the hours in the world, and I kind of don’t trust your opinion on something if you haven’t.
Not sure if I’d call him a major writer, but Raymond Chandler is one of my favorites and I think he’s a good example. To me there is a fundamental difference between his crime stories, which show the results of corporate life, alcoholism, personal tragedy, war, etc. and a more modern crime writer that’s just writing a genre piece with all the right pieces, but no actual personal experience.
seanhunter 24 hours ago [-]
Well the canonical example is Diana Athill who had a long and distinguished career at a literary editor for people Phillip Roth, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Jack Kerouac and others, then retired at the age of 75 and started writing her own novels and memoirs and is considered one of the greatest writers in English of the 20th century. “After a funeral” is I think the one of hers I read and it’s amazing
"The accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works, often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of reality....But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all? "
Major=got popular enough? That doesn't need to be fully correlated to the quality of the work.
chmod775 1 days ago [-]
Popularity is an indicator of a quality (appeal). If the author intends to write something with wide appeal and succeeds, they're probably good at their job. Now something can be popular and read by many people without necessarily appealing to them, but that's another story.
What is important to keep in mind is that works of literature have more than one quality, and even "great" works exceed at often just a few, while being mediocre on other axis. Many are considered great merely for being first or having an outsized influence on works that came after, even though later works improved on it and did the same thing better!
Kreutzer 1 days ago [-]
Right. And "written" isn't the best way to describe these, rather they are "published" after so-and-so.
ForRealsies 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
OtherShrezzing 1 days ago [-]
This is a disappointing statistical modelling technique.
The author asked LLMs to produce lists of data which are readily available on the likes of wikipedia. Author date of birth, list of publications, and publication release date are all fairly easy to get hold of. They just need formatted appropriately. The LLMs produced a few false positives, and missed out some prominent works.
I get that this is just the author working in public & writing about what they're up to, but the number of avoidable errors introduced by the methodology make reading it a poor use of time.
NetMageSCW 23 hours ago [-]
Fairly easily feels like it is doing some heavy lifting here. How much code would it take to produce a list of authors of major works (whatever that means), and their age when the work was published?
boznz 23 hours ago [-]
For me my 60's was the best time to start writing fiction, before then I always had excuses why I would not write, now with much more free time, experience and no money worries, I can think back on all those thousands of novels I read, knowing I could write a better one. Writing is also one of the cheapest retirement hobbies you can have and you are also more likely to experiment across different genres as you are not pandering to an audience.
latexr 1 days ago [-]
> In trying to come up with some good examples I asked LLMs. (…)
> So I tried to cast the net more broadly and asked LLMs (…)
> EDIT: also hunted down several mistakes, as one would expect from LLMs; thanks to commenters.
This is a slop post. You can’t trust any of the data. It’s baffling and worrying the author apparently understands mistakes from LLMs are to be expected but still decided to publish without doing due diligence.
lynndotpy 1 days ago [-]
"Source: I made it up" was a meme meant to be deployed in conversations between children online. And now we're seeing the phrase deployed sincerely and almost verbatim in the annals of the most prestigious institutions of thought.
Things seem a bit more dire now.
salviati 1 days ago [-]
You're pushing back against openly using LLMs to assist in research for writing articles.
In my opinion the effect of your pushback is nudging people to not disclose their use of LLMs. I'm not sure that's what you want.
In other words, if every time someone says "I used an LLM to assist me with this article" they get backslash, these people will not stop using LLMs. They'll stop telling that they did.
asimpletune 1 days ago [-]
I don't think the problem is that they used an LLM to write the article. It seems that the commenter takes issue with them using the LLM to get the data to analyze.
latexr 1 days ago [-]
And not even verifying it before publishing.
NetMageSCW 23 hours ago [-]
It feels like a natural result of life expectancy increasing over 70 (world wide average) only in 2021 and a number of years past publication being required for something to be deemed a major work means it is natural that there are few today. Something like 100%, 110%, and 120% if life expectancy at the author’s time of birth might be a more useful measure today.
OJFord 1 days ago [-]
> Also interestingly, the trend in that graph keeps going up in recent years… but it looks to me like this is driven by lack of major works from young authors. It may be how my sample is constructed.
Isn't that because older authors have had more time to gain notoriety, their earlier works to be deemed 'major' in retrospect?
CobrastanJorji 1 days ago [-]
There are a suspicously large number of very straight diagonal lines on those graphs with identical slopes. I might predict that they are individual famous authors that released a lot of works, but the slopes are all identical. What's going on there?
yCombLinks 20 hours ago [-]
All of the authors age at a rate of 1 year per year
shrubble 1 days ago [-]
Douglas Southall Freeman wrote the definitive biography of Robert E Lee over twenty years, publishing it when he was 49; he then went on to publish his seven volume biography on George Washington when he was 62 (he finished the sixth volume on the day he died; the seventh was completed by his research assistants).
candlemas 1 days ago [-]
John Milton was 63 when Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published.
marstall 1 days ago [-]
and he wrote them when he was completely blind!
1 days ago [-]
IncreasePosts 1 days ago [-]
Well, his amanuenses and slave-daughters wrote them, he just spoke the words
suddenlybananas 10 hours ago [-]
What are you referring to with his "slave daughters"?
vismit2000 16 hours ago [-]
Most of the literature by Srila Prabhupada used in most universities around the world was written well over the age of 75: https://prabhupadabooks.com/books
lkm0 24 hours ago [-]
Beyond the data science interest, isn't this sort of charting powered by the "my time's running out and I still haven't left my mark in history" intrusive thought? Purely from a fitting perspective I'd wager the correlation is close to zero, because "major works" will be different in a century, and again changed in two. Shakespeare was not very popular in the 17th per wikipedia. As George Orwell put it, it's much easier to write when you do it for a purpose that matters to you. Hugo wrote Notre-Dame mostly to rant about architecture; creating a major work for the purpose of staving off fears of being forgotten I feel is not enough in itself
randomNumber7 22 hours ago [-]
It could be the feeling that you are more capable compared to others and actually missed something if you don't find an appropriate use for it.
ikidd 1 days ago [-]
That doesn't bode well for GRR Martin getting the last book done.
arduanika 1 days ago [-]
George R. R. Martin completed his cycle "A Song of Ice and Fire" when he was...wait...I'll get back to you on this one.
chuckadams 1 days ago [-]
Hasn't he publicly stated that he's given up on completing it? TBH if that is the case, I kind of respect him more for that.
justin66 1 days ago [-]
> Hasn't he publicly stated that he's given up on completing it?
No.
bethekidyouwant 1 days ago [-]
I feel like Cormac McCarthy famously took 20 years to write his novels so does it really count if you finished it when you were 72?
Synaesthesia 1 days ago [-]
It counts more! His novels are mind-blowing. Blood Meridian is unsurpassed IMO
bethekidyouwant 1 days ago [-]
No counts less? he didn’t write the work when he was 72. If started it when he was 52…
1 days ago [-]
joeldg 1 days ago [-]
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apparatur 1 days ago [-]
covfefe was at ~71
joeldg 1 days ago [-]
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Rendered at 20:02:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
This seems like the kind of thing that should be more widely known, and have some good tutorials written for it :)
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction
And you can find lots of SPARQL examples here:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/...
I tried modifying it to give me authors whose first publication (any publication at all) happened after 60 years old, but also who had at least one wdt:P800 work. I got people like Cato the Elder, Josephus, and William of Tyre.
I tried again for only people born in the 20th century, and I got some results (plus quite a bit of wrong answers, presumably something about the query or data)! Oddly quite a few of the results are from criminals who wrote an autobiography after their release, including Henri Charrière and the infamous Nazi, Albert Speer.
Wait, so the source data is just LLM hallucinations? It makes sense to use an LLM to build the data collection, but not to build your source data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587662
Especially in cases such as this. For well known works of literature and music structured data exists already.
Of course it’s not the kind of question you can get an objectively correct answer for, but you could come up with the correct answer for a given methodology.
You can only correct for missing entries by doing the same work you’d need to start from scratch. But after that you now have a second list to consider.
So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.
Literature (esp novels) seems to occupy an older range, perhaps 30s to 50s. Perhaps classical music and philosophy also? I don't know about the visual arts.
I interpret it as the former requiring the creative fireworks of youthful neural elasticity and the latter the depth we associate with lived experience and wisdom.
Naturally there are outliers (general relativity in Einstein's early 30s, Shakespeare word play till his late 40s) but I think in general these rules of thumb seem to be a good guide for the very highest achievers and for the most creative periods for us mere mortals.
Mediocrity of course is unconstrained by age.
I think there's something similar in chess where players tend to peak around their mid to late 30s. But a major issue there is that that's also the age that most players are having children and developing ever more interests. And they're competing against the younger generation which is still dedicating 100% of their life, and time, to chess. Absent some monumental edge, that's a battle you're going to inevitably lose - even if aging factors did not exist.
Not everyone survives to write to an old age.
Old people have health problems that can prevent them from work, like going blind.
People who write a great work at an old age will not have the time and energy to do all the non-writing parts of making the great work seen by readers - which has always been a big part of writing. Like getting their book in bookstores, advertising it, etc.
If someone is a very talented writer they are likely to write great stuff before they get old and may spend their old age preening and working on their legacy instead of new works. They will already know they're a great writer, so the drive to make another great work is lessened.
If someone is already an accomplished writer more of their time will be taken up with invitations to speak, being on award panels, doing interviews, writing introductions.
There is less financial incentive to write a great work when you're very old.
It is harder to be part of a literary salon full of smart people that help you grow your creativity when you're very old.
As people grow older they become more alienated from the zeitgeist and are better at connecting with their own generation.
Everything we personally do will mostly be forgotten in short order in basically all cases. Even the exceptions do little more than stretch out the timeline by a bit. Jeff Bezos of tomorrow will be the John Astor of today; many, if not most, young developers have never even heard of John Carmack. The only real legacy we can ever truly have is our children, because they will be the humanity of tomorrow.
But on the other hand, the world is very complicated and you can't know much in your 20s. I'm today a much better programmer than 10 years ago, even with slightly less brains. You are not going to write an impactfull novel without live experience.
How that declines varies and some people still have most cognitive capabilities in their 70s.
In 6th grade, I had gone to a chess coach who were a friend of my father (technically my father knew his father very well). It was my birthday/a day close to it IIRC and I wanted to learn chess. He was an international-master (or close to it) /National-master (I think he just had one norm less) and he told me about his story and everything, but he said that in a way, he does feel like if he had put the efforts within something like finance for example, he really could earn more than 10 times the money but he said that he really loved chess with a passion. I think that is another element and I think he was within his 30's. Not everyone makes it even that big within chess aside from a very few at the top
You are sort of right in the manner that, as teens grow and the focus of life/dedication from teenage years on solely getting good at chess, diversifies into for example relationships/money-aspects, the mind simply doesn't have enough competition to play chess Comparing this to a 18 year old or 17 year old who just wants to get best at chess and doesn't really want anything else other than chess with their complete and utter dedication.
(There is also another theory recently within Chess of the pressures of being the world champion, from Ding Liren to Gukesh, both have faced tremendous losses after being the best, Gukesh has even lost 75 points after being the world champion, which I believe also has to be because of how many eyes/the pressure building up)
I still like playing chess but all of this makes me also appreciate all the chess players as well in a bit-more behind the scenes manner too. At professional level, calling it taxing sport mentally might even be a bit of an understatement especially for the people within their 30's.
another thing I personally like about Ding and Gukesh both is that they are both humble. They might win or lose but with the brief time that they both had/will have the crown is with their own humbleness. I really like them both a lot. Hope history remembers both their struggles and their humbleness.
He didn't compete for the world champion becaue he didn't want to put in the effort for the preparation (again). Also it would have been boring if he played it because he would have won again.
He intentionally starts with subobtimal openings at major turnaments because of boredom and still wins.
Carlsen's paradoxical because he's undoubtedly the strongest player in contemporary times, if not in the entire history of chess, but his world championship matches have never been particularly impressive. And he thinks that his ability peaked sometime shortly before his match with Nepo. So he probably thinks there's a fairly good chance of him losing if he played another world championship match.
On top of these observations, the one player he was willing to play a world championship match against was Alireza Firouzja. Alireza has an extremely poor record against Magnus, especially in slower time controls, had no experience in the pressures of a world championship match, and Magnus would have been an absurdly huge favorite against him.
In other words, he's not playing a world championship matches because there's a reasonably good chance he spends months of work and effort preparing for it, only to ultimately lose and put that mark on his legacy. Right now it's still perfectly reasonable to call him the GOAT, but if he lost to somebody in a WCC match, that'd now always come with an asterisk.
Regarding boredom, I think that either it was magnus or hikaru who are/were really optimistic about chess960 (randomized chess essentially) because they have less value to openings and more values to the more live-ness of the situation so it has some exciting element to it.
At a certain point for magnus, there really is only enough excitement within classical chess if you are the best players in the world. But he seems excited about chess960
(Edit: you have accidentally made me wonder but would hackernews like a chess club of our community [preferably within lichess]?) https://lichess.org/team/hackernews-chess-club (The password is dang) :]
Edit2: Interestingly, there is already a hackernews-chess-club after searching back on hackernews, https://lichess.org/team/hacker-news, but they had the idea 6 years ago interesting :)
My take on this is that it takes about a decade before experience, knowledge and wisdom can be used to see a bigger picture to make a breakthrough.
[0] https://priceonomics.com/at-what-age-does-genius-strike/
a) the curve indicates 30s not 40s
b) there is no breakdown into theoretical vs experimental research, or scientific field; theory I would expect to be over-represented at the younger end especially as the science discipline becomes "harder".
Overall I would say it lends credence to the idea physics is a young person's game at the very highest levels.
b) true there is no breakdown but I would expect the exact opposite as fields get harder. More context requires more training and familiarity, which I would expect to increase age.
My point is that I think there's a bias in the field towards the youth narrative but the majority of discovery, even in physics, happens at a later age.
Nobody I've ever met would expect a breakthrough from a 20 something year old no matter how much of a genius they are. Communicating a breakthrough requires time, effort, and credibility to begin with, which nobody has at that age.
Your 30's are when you can start to really do great things. And then depending on the field you can kind of just keep going as long as you have the energy for it. But lots of people begin to wear out into their 40's (for lots of different reasons).
In terms of great breakthroughs. If you haven't had your great idea by 40. It's probably increasingly unlikely that you'll have one later in life (but not impossible). Not everyone needs to have a paradigm changing idea to have a successful career though.
The exceptions to that pattern are remarkable.
If we expand the definition of pop music to all music that isn’t classical/jazz/experimental, etc. then older, more experienced musicians should be able to do quite well. Frank Sinatra honed his craft over the decades. I think the stuff he did in his 40s and 50s is probably his best.
I would suggest it's more the demands of poverty that make it a young person's game. So, so, so many pop musicians were "I was living in squalor for a decade plus was extremely depressed and was about to hang it up when <thing happened> and we got popular." Huey Lewis, Annie Lennox, ... I can go on and on.
There was a metal artist that was being interviewed about when they were going to tour again and was "Yeah, we'll consider it. But I've got a lot of work at my tattoo business right now." There was another guy that was like "Yeah, had this fame hit in our 20s this would be nice but in our late 30s it isn't really useful. We figured out how to do life by now, and we're not going to disrupt that."
That being said, I think an interesting factor would also be which of those who wrote major works in their later age already did a decent amount of writing in their earlier years. Even if you have life experience, I would imagine that you will have to build up the "muscle memory" of writing skills in your more elastic years (e.g. by becoming a successful writer after a lifetime of journalistic work or just minor literary works).
I think the best place to look for major works late in life is probably historical writing, which calls for accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Looking at the four most recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize in history from 2023-2025 [0], all appear to be north of 50 based on their Wikipedia pages (which give dates of education if not dates of birth), and one is in her 70s [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_History [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Jones
I can, just from feeling, agree to the pop music. About math I would cite the example of Gilbert Strang, who made many books at advanced age, including one at age 86 or other publications well over the 70s. Another example (well not math, but CS) Donald Knuth. I do not know how is the whole statistic, but writing good books, even text books, does not seem to be teenager thing.
I think there's a chance this is itself a type of selection bias, because you're over-indexing on the famous. And fame has consequences.
Many music artists end up trapped by their own fame (and attendant expectations) and fail to update themselves over time, thus falling out of the limelight. But there are plenty who defy this trend. Tiesto, David Guetta, Kaskade, and Armin van Buuren in EDM, for example. Coldplay is another great example. Love them or hate them, they're still putting out chart toppers.
Something similar is true for scientists in my opinion. I think Richard Hamming had the most incisive analysis of this in 'You and Your Research' [1], which is worth reading in its entirety.
> But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.
> When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
My view is that fatalistically assuming that age is an obstacle to creative output obscures the hidden variables that are genuinely determinative.
[1] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/you-and-your-research-...
Not in this case, no, at least as far as the music goes.
My user-name here is taken from a Northern Soul record as its the music that means the most to me. The genre is obscure almost by definition.
I would guesstimate the proportion of the hundreds (thousands?) of records so classified and celebrated made by people under 30 to be over 95% and that correlates with my (admittedly subjective) experience of the best music of other pop genres.
I think this graph is a great illustration about how anonymising data is hard. It's very easy to isolate individual authors from this list, because there are clear diagonal lines because the year and age are increasing in lockstep. This also suggests there aren't actually that many authors in this collection, because of these strong diagonals everywhere.
There's probably also some erroneous data here with a bunch of points representing material written by people at age 34 between about 1920 and 1940 (an obvious horizontal line) when most of the rest of the graph doesn't show any strong horizontal bias for a specific age.
There are 200 according to the website.
For most of his professional life he was a journalist. He published his second novel at 55, only found his narrative style at almost 60, then wrote 15 novels (and won a Nobel) after that. What an amazing career.
Not sure if I’d call him a major writer, but Raymond Chandler is one of my favorites and I think he’s a good example. To me there is a fundamental difference between his crime stories, which show the results of corporate life, alcoholism, personal tragedy, war, etc. and a more modern crime writer that’s just writing a genre piece with all the right pieces, but no actual personal experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Athill
Thoughts on Late Style by Edward Said https://www.edwardsaid.org/articles/thoughts-on-late-style/
What is important to keep in mind is that works of literature have more than one quality, and even "great" works exceed at often just a few, while being mediocre on other axis. Many are considered great merely for being first or having an outsized influence on works that came after, even though later works improved on it and did the same thing better!
The author asked LLMs to produce lists of data which are readily available on the likes of wikipedia. Author date of birth, list of publications, and publication release date are all fairly easy to get hold of. They just need formatted appropriately. The LLMs produced a few false positives, and missed out some prominent works.
I get that this is just the author working in public & writing about what they're up to, but the number of avoidable errors introduced by the methodology make reading it a poor use of time.
> So I tried to cast the net more broadly and asked LLMs (…)
> EDIT: also hunted down several mistakes, as one would expect from LLMs; thanks to commenters.
This is a slop post. You can’t trust any of the data. It’s baffling and worrying the author apparently understands mistakes from LLMs are to be expected but still decided to publish without doing due diligence.
Things seem a bit more dire now.
In my opinion the effect of your pushback is nudging people to not disclose their use of LLMs. I'm not sure that's what you want.
In other words, if every time someone says "I used an LLM to assist me with this article" they get backslash, these people will not stop using LLMs. They'll stop telling that they did.
Isn't that because older authors have had more time to gain notoriety, their earlier works to be deemed 'major' in retrospect?
No.