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

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.

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 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.

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/

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.

Isn't that because older authors have had more time to gain notoriety, their earlier works to be deemed 'major' in retrospect?