[potatofarmer45]

Looking at the comments, there needs to be a distinction between the "eminent" career vs what people define as "success" in the title.

The success in this paper is the equivalent of the Forbes 30 under 30 rankings except it's when you're 48. There will be genuinely eminent people who run a fortune 500 company, illustrious careers in academia, but the methodology of simply searching for someone years later has clear problems.

What if you were to win a Nobel prize at age 55 or 60 (very common). You may have contributions earlier but didn't meet the criteria.

On the reverse, like with Forbes 30 under 30, there are always people who master personal branding and PR over substance. Lot's of news articles about you doesn't equate to being eminent in the usual definition of the world- just well known.

FYI, I'm not disputing their thesis or suggesting their results are wrong, I just find it odd that evaluating people at age 48, they couldn't find an algorithm much better than Forbes 30 under 30 which we all know has a lot of BS.

I'd be curious to the results at age 75.

[knzhou]

The methodology is much much better than Forbes 30 under 30. In Forbes you pay to nominate yourself. The list is accordingly mostly people in obscure startups seeking to use it to attract publicity. The "eminence" in this study is based on what people actually did.

[perl4ever]

Don't most people who attain the highest levels of executive positions peak around 60-65, i.e. near retirement age? Without definitely knowing the typical age of a CEO, that's my stereotype. And the candidates for president of the US seem to be trending even older these days.