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.
SELECT ?work ?workLabel ?author ?authorLabel ?publicationDate ?ageAtPublication
WHERE {
?author wdt:P569 ?birth .
?author wdt:P570 ?death .
?author wdt:P800 ?work .
?work wdt:P50 ?author ;
wdt:P31 wd:Q47461344 ;
wdt:P577 ?publicationDate .
FILTER(?publicationDate <= ?death)
BIND(YEAR(?publicationDate) - YEAR(?birth) AS ?ageAtPublication)
FILTER(?ageAtPublication > 60)
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}
ORDER BY DESC(?ageAtPublication)
LIMIT 300 ?work wdt:P50 ?author ;
wdt:P577 ?publicationDate ;
wdt:P8383 ?goodreadsID .
?article schema:about ?work ;
schema:isPartOf <https://en.wikipedia.org/> ;
schema:inLanguage "en" .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.
mellosouls•2h ago
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.
bee_rider•1h ago
sunrunner•1h ago
bee_rider•42m ago
f1shy•1h ago
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.
tgv•1h ago
IAmBroom•57m ago
somenameforme•1h ago
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.
Imustaskforhelp•22m ago
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.
allturtles•1h ago
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
TimPC•42m ago