If you look at the patents of companies like IBM, Boeing, etc, you notice that most patents are invented by people in their 40's and above.

Same if you look at Nobel Prizes.

Hell, the Fields medal limits max age to 40 as a reaction to Nobels mostly going to people over 40

If you look at successful tech entrepreneurs, the same pattern holds.

In STEM, it seems you really don't get good in your field until you've worked in it for 15 years or so. You'll hit your stride in your 40's.

Yeah yeah, Galois and Ramanujan yada yada. Still holds true.

So in STEM, you are almost certainly not good until you're in your 40's.

"at 50 a man is at the maximum of his villainy," as Mencken said.

Now, compare that to successful people in the humanities.

Would it be accurate to say that people in the humanities also hit their stride in their 40's?

According to this https://books.google.com/books?id=_p-FCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT1418&lpg=PT1418&dq=average+age+of+pulitzer+winners&source=bl&ots=8PRfaz6G5m&sig=ACfU3U3X0E3EE20-JFVwk92qmava8I01dw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwix9NTzwo3qAhXUGM0KHaOKD7UQ6AEwDnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=average%20age%20of%20pulitzer%20winners&f=false the average age of pulitzer winners is almost exactly 40, for instance

So: would it be accurate to say that both in STEM and the humanities, people rarely hit their stride before the age of 40?

And if 40 is the minimum average age of competence, you've got to wonder why STEM idolizes youth so much, and discriminates by age so much.

In STEM, almost no one under the age of 40 has contributed anything worthwhile, but people over 40 are viewed as doddering fossils.

Yes, that's supposed to anger people who idolize STEM.

But, it is interesting to consider that despite your field, pretty much no matter what you do, you reach the top of your game in your 40's.

If people, no matter what their field or the supposed difficulty of their field, from quantum physics to fantasy writing, only really hit their stride in their 40's, it makes you wonder where the large part of their education actually is.

Would it be fair to say the majority of a person's education in their field, takes place after they've graduated?

The average age of a PhD graduate is 33.

The average age of nobel prize winners is now ~58.

They spend 3x longer in the field than studying for their field.

For physics winners, that average is bumped up into the late-60's.

It seems fair to say that formal education in a field is a rather small fraction of the total education required for mastery.

So: it seems like regardless of the field, only a small part of one's education toward mastery of it takes place in formal education.

The vast majority of it, happens *in the field*

Which has a lot of interesting implications.

One of which is: the biases present in that field, will overwhelmingly outweigh the biases present in the formal education. Most of your learning is after you graduate.

Another is: if even a PhD only accounts for a fraction of the expertise required to master a field, then formal education itself is a very biased way of looking at the process of gaining mastery. It's a small part of the picture.

Another interesting implication: imagine if 40 is a false minimum, and you don't really master your field until the age of 150.

What if, across galactic civilizations, nothing whatsoever of worth was made by a being younger than 150 years old?

What if the only really good poems, songs, paintings, experiments, inventions, and proofs require another century of experience to produce?

What if we find out that you only *really* hit your stride once you've been in the field for a century, and humanity has been too broken to ever see someone actually at the top of their game?

And then consider AI, which could acquire a century worth of experience in a field in much less time than a human. That's a whole different can of worms.

Basically: odds are you are not yet at the top of your game, and the height of your villainy is still ahead of you.