Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 106 posts

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#71

Post by Ajedi32 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #41
wodenokoto wrote: post #29

> 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.

LLMs cite. So hope they did their due diligence.

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.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#72

Post by throw4847285 »

FelipeCortez wrote: post #28
tantalor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you filter by "major works only"?

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": ?work wdt:P50 ?author ; wdt:P577 ?publicationDate ; wdt:P8383 ?goodreadsID . ?article schema:about ?work ; schema:isPartOf ; schema:inLanguage "en" .

I don't think that's what they meant by major.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#73

Post by musictubes »

TimPC wrote: post #21
mellosouls wrote: post #2

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 crea…

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.

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.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#74

Post by uoaei »

dyauspitr wrote: post #70
Retric wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the point of getting the wrong answer quickly? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587662

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.

Do extra work in step 2 because you got lazy in step 1 is not my idea of efficient or complete.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#75

Post by par1970 »

throw4847285 wrote: post #72
FelipeCortez wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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": ?work wdt:P50 ?author ; wdt:P577 ?publicationDate ; wdt:P8383 ?goodreadsID . ?article schema:about ?work ; schema:isPartOf ; schema:inLanguage "en" .

I don't think that's what they meant by major.

Why?

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#76

Post by seanhunter »

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Athill

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#77

Post by lkm0 »

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

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#78

Post by boznz »

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.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#79

Post by bryanrasmussen »

uoaei wrote: post #74
dyauspitr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do extra work in step 2 because you got lazy in step 1 is not my idea of efficient or complete.

that depends how much more quickly and efficiently you can do the extra work in step 2 than in step 1.

Re: What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

#80

Post by andai »

FelipeCortez wrote: post #22

This is actually a good fit for a Wikidata SPARQL query you can run here https://query.wikidata.org/ : 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 60) SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase…

How can I learn more about this? I looked into it recently but didn't get very far.

This seems like the kind of thing that should be more widely known, and have some good tutorials written for it :)

Post reply on HN