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.

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).

John Milton was 63 when Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published.

> 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.

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.

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?

[dead]

covfefe was at ~71