> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.
detourdog · 3d ago
What we have already lost is the process of reading the newspapers that birthed the obituary.
Newspaper's used to have strong local coverage and a collection of vignettes into the outside world. The way the author uses the obituaries is the way I used to use the newspapers. Getting multiple newspapers (and magazines) from all over the world was a fixture for New York City creative offices pre-internet.
jayknight · 3d ago
When in doing genealogy, I tend to save obituaries in archive.org and archive.ph and sometimes paste the content into the wikitree profile.
None of those are guaranteed to be around in 50 years, but hopefully it helps a little.
smartmic · 3d ago
I think the idea from the original article is great! But although I'm a fan of printed newspapers and even subscribe to a renowned one, I unfortunately can't take part in it, simply because in my cultural circle (Germany) there are no detailed obituaries of ordinary people in the newspaper, only death notices. But that's always been the case here - at least that's how I know it.
toomuchtodo · 3d ago
Obits should intentionally be committed to the Internet Archive for longevity and preservation, but I digress.
DoingIsLearning · 3d ago
The Internet Archive is massive force for good and a huge not-for profit effort.
However in certain aspects of preservation of History (for example if deemed high value at a national level) we should also expect national archives to duplicate the effort to preserve this and other information with historic value.
inglor_cz · 3d ago
I wonder how much would such national digital archives resist rewriting of history.
It is much harder to doctor hard copies of newspapers or books. You can burn them, but altering them is a complicated challenge, and someone may own another copy of the originals.
With digital records, the temptation is stronger because the editing is easier, and other "unofficial" copies that diverge from the officially archived version may be declared to be fake/misinformation etc.
bryanrasmussen · 3d ago
Well, I have some experience with the Danish National Archives, but may be out of date.
First, the rule used to be that they could crawl all Danish sites or having interest to Danish government (so I guess also news reports of Denmark or discussion in other nations) ignoring robots.txt, which yes I found that to be a very wrong headed rule but that's what it was. So obviously they need to put in a good deal of effort to get content into the archives that would be getting blocked otherwise.
At the same time governmental records, including the records and cases in communities around the country get added to archives (but of course are only available to scholars at some future date)
So theoretically this is a lot of data. I suppose other national archives probably have similar rules and situations.
It would seem unlikely that one could rewrite history easily with so much data, without alerting people to what you were doing. But I guess that is actually the lesson of Fascism, they don't care if you see what they're doing.
They will do it and then hope you forget how it got to be like it is.
akoboldfrying · 3d ago
Timestamping services that use digital signatures solve this, basically.
inglor_cz · 3d ago
Archives are meant to last for decades and centuries.
I am not sure if any currently used timestamping algorithm remains unbroken in 2100 or so.
immibis · 3d ago
The Internet Archive is constantly under attack for daring to preserve pressure waves. One of these days the destruction will be successful. Probably right now, under a Republican landslide government.
gosub100 · 2d ago
Are you saying Republicans are pro copyright and democrats aren't?
immibis · 2d ago
Democrats are the party of doing nothing and maintaining the status quo.
gosub100 · 2d ago
except you've just defined "conservative".
immibis · 2d ago
Democrats are conservative in the traditional sense, which is identical to Liberal with a capital L. Are you confused about the way labels shift and parties change their ideologies over time?
gosub100 · 2d ago
What does "conservative in the traditional sense" mean? I suspect you're throwing words around.
immibis · 1d ago
Me: some statement
You: "you just defined conservative"
Me: "yes, that's conservative"
You: "how do you define conservative?"
My reaction: ??????
gosub100 · 1d ago
I asked what that word salad meant. Not how you defined the single word.
If you need 3rd grade simplified reductions like you just posted, we cannot continue here. Divorce from reality and truth is why your party lost trust with intelligent voters and must appeal to emotion and crisis to rally support, ultimately losing elections. Congratulations
KerrAvon · 3d ago
It wasn't a landslide by any definition except the Trump campaign's; Trump won by an extremely narrow margin. It's important to be accurate about this to try to preempt despair.
genewitch · 3d ago
Half the 2020 blue counties switched red. Say what you want about the popular vote, but a lot of people had to wonder which of their neighbors...
rdtsc · 3d ago
> Trump won by an extremely narrow margin
It was 312 vs 226 votes, including seven swing states, and got the popular vote. I guess to make ourselves feel better we’ll just say an extremely thin margin. But as long as it’s with a nod and wink; kind of like saying that alligators also fly, just extremely, extremely low.
inglor_cz · 3d ago
Trump won by an extremely narrow margin in the popular vote, but by a high margin in the electoral college, which was the real prize fought over by the two candidates. He took all seven swing states.
IDK if this counts as landslide in the American sense. I mostly heard that expression used for results of European elections.
Edit: instant downvote, didn't even take a minute from the original posting! Wow.
Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics. The fact that Trump got 312 electoral votes to Harris' 226 is just that, a fact. It does not reflect any subjective attitudes or preferences of anyone taking part in this discussion, wisdom or idiocy of current White House policies etc.
toast0 · 3d ago
A lot of Republicans are calling it a landslide, but I think they've forgotten what a landslide looks like; along with forgetting a lot of other things.
Out of 538 votes, in 2024, Trump had 312; in 2020, Biden had 306, just a few less, and Trump had 304 in 2016, only 8 less than his "landslide". In 2012, Obama had 332 and in 2008, he had 365. Clinton had 370 and 379. I wouldn't call any of those landslides though.
GHW Bush had 426 which is quite a lot, but Reagan before him had 489 and then 525. Those are landslides.
Nixon got 301 the first time, which is just a win; but he got 520 in his second term. That was a landslide.
I would draw a line in the sand at 90% of the electoral vote is a landslide, and anything less is puffery. Ranked by percentage of electors, Trump's "landslide" is only 44 out of 60. That's the saddest landslide ever. 58% of electors is a clear and undebatable win, but it's not a landslide and it's not a mandate, or even a large margin. It might be an indictment of the Democratic Party or some other lesser hyperbole though.
peterbecich · 3d ago
I agree with you the true landslides were Nixon, Reagan, FDR, etc.
The absence of electoral landslides in recent years implies both parties are better tuned and optimized now. Their data collection to enable a "winning campaign platform" is probably much better now, resulting in close elections.
vintermann · 3d ago
My theory is that it's a result of institutionalized corruption: neither party wants to win by a landslide anymore. They want to win, in Dick Cheney's words (quoted in Obama's biography), "fifty percent plus one".
They want to share the spoils of victory with as few as possible. Winning with a big margin, to the party apparatus, is evidence that you wasted valuable political capital on pleasing voters that could instead have been spent on pleasing donors.
nothrabannosir · 3d ago
> Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics.
However, I am sensitive about shoe-horning political talking points into a conversation.
inglor_cz · 3d ago
Did I do that? Not knowingly; my main intent was to reflect on what "landslide" may mean in various perspectives.
Personally, I am more to the right than to the left, but I don't enjoy the clusterfuck of the current administration at all, doubly so because our local security (a small NATO member which used to be subjugated to Moscow) has been thrown into total uncertainty.
nothrabannosir · 3d ago
You didn’t, the (grandparent)post you replied to did.
immibis · 3d ago
You can ignore politics but politics won't ignore you.
gosub100 · 2d ago
"you're either with us or against us"
immibis · 1d ago
Indeed. You can try not to be with or against a totalitarian regime, but they'll still interpret your position as against.
rat87 · 3d ago
Landslide is about popular vote not electoral. Because a small shift in popular vote can result in a massive swing in electoral vote. Claiming somin has a landslide is silly
lolinder · 3d ago
This is partially true but not the whole picture. A small shift in popular vote across the seven swing states can result in a massive swing in electoral vote. Shifts in safe states don't register in the electoral college but do register in the national popular vote.
pcthrowaway · 3d ago
Even the popular vote was the biggest landslide in ... the last 8 elections I think?
sethherr · 3d ago
Absolutely not. Trump got 49.9% to Harris’ 48.3, he didn’t even get the majority.
Biden was 51.3 to Trump’s 46.8 in 2020.
This was not a landslide. Trump did not get the majority of votes.
He has much less of a “mandate” than Biden did.
throw0101a · 3d ago
> There is a real danger that obituaries of people in the early 21st century will become inaccessible to future generations due to obituary rot:
When my father died we got a 'complementary' online posting from the funeral home for ~1 year (for funeral/service details), but I also made the effort to pay to put one in the newspaper for posterity.
speckx · 3d ago
When my mother-in-law died, I immediately registered a domain for her name and created a website and added the obituary, eulogy, and a photo gallery and shared that with friends and family for exactly this reason.
pabs3 · 3d ago
Which domain? I'll send it to archive.org using ArchiveBot.
That's cool, but doesn't it have the same problem? When you die or decide to stop paying, the website dies too.
nightfly · 3d ago
Archive.org
bombcar · 3d ago
People are going to be surprised Pikachu when that goes down, either from poking the law bear or just because everything dies eventually.
thesuitonym · 3d ago
In 1000 years, you're unlikely to find any given book, hard drive, or newspaper that is still legible, but accessing any of those is far more likely than finding an Internet Archive datacenter, spinning it back up, and accessing the contents.
Jaygles · 3d ago
Companies that aggregate and sell data suck up all of the obituaries as they are public record and unburdened by regulations on sharing and selling it. Although it may not be in its original form (as far as I know), info from obituaries may actually be positioned to survive a very long time.
dleeftink · 3d ago
There's a danger, but also a natural way of things. Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
Mind I can get behind the genealogy argument, yet feel that our post-life records being accessible by default is not an assumption we can make unilaterally.
globnomulous · 3d ago
> Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
The historical record is important and we don't know what will be useful to future generations.
Take Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms as an example. It briefly recounts the multiple legal proceedings that the Roman Catholic Church brought against a humble Italian Renaissance-era miller who spread strange, heretical ideas about the cosmos (involving the cheese that was apparently the moon's substance and the worms that ate it). Ginzburg draws on Church records, including the man's own written defense, and builds a fascinating picture of his mental world, intellect, and disposition.
If I remember correctly, these small, cloudy windows into the Early Modern past even let Ginzburg identify likely traces of pre-Christian, or folk, traditions largely hidden from the written record.
This is a funny example, I suppose, because in all likelihood the miller would have been tickled to know that his ideas survived and found an audience not just despite but because of Church persecution.
Still, his case nicely illustrates the importance and unpredictable value of the historical record.
20after4 · 3d ago
An early example of the Streisand effect? Should it be more accurately named the Ginzburg effect? :D
titaphraz · 3d ago
It's really hard to find stuff from the "old internet" on google. I know it's there. But instead it feeds me garbage marketing articles that just touch the surface and then try to sell me something.
lubujackson · 3d ago
I suggest trying Yandex, no joke. It feels like 2005 Google - no industry forced filtering or rerouting, no BS recipe sites boosted by SEO and "time on page" manipulation...
thesuitonym · 2d ago
wiby.me, marginalia.nu, and kagi.com seem to do a better job at this. Wiby is specific to old web, and even has a delightful "Surprise me" button that can take you to some fun little websites that provide an insight into someone's life.
dogman1050 · 3d ago
Neither of my parents obits are available online. They passed in 1998 and 2002. My wife's mother's obit is still out there from 2012.
nsenifty · 3d ago
The bigger danger is that all obituaries will be written by an AI.
rat87 · 3d ago
Non famous obituaries are written by family members or friends. It's possible they'll use AI to clean up the wording
criddell · 3d ago
Obituaries are often written by funeral directors after a brief interview with the family.
hackable_sand · 3d ago
That is okay. People deserve the right to die.
6502nerdface · 3d ago
But not the right to be forgotten.
magicmicah85 · 3d ago
EU begs to differ, but the right to be forgotten certainly ends when you die.
Here's what currently happens: obit links get passed around among friends, family, loved ones. Anyone who catches wind of a death and is remotely interested in family history/geneaology is going to archive it and plug it in somewhere. Such as Find-a-Grave, ancestry.com, etc. Ancestry themselves should be actively indexing all these obits and such.
Digital obits will last so long that you will hate them forever, and curse the day they wrote yours.
Because here's what's going to happen next: every "data point" in those obits will be plugged into databases. Family Trees, Find-a-Grave Memorials, personal ancestral files. Those will be indexed, searchable, and every single factoid will be repeated and reduplicated and copy-pasted in perpetuity.
Unfortunately, anyone who reads obits and knows some family history also knows that obits are riddled with errors. Sometimes they're deliberate! Sometimes they misdirect or protect the innocent, minors, whatever. Sometimes they're spiteful and sometimes they're simply papering over scandal with something anodyne.
So you've got a 95% true obituary that's being traded and scraped and plugged into databases, and those 5% falsehoods are going to multiply like a pernicious cancer.
Once I delved into my family tree, I found that most of my effort and resources were in disproving connections, removing sources, and reconciling conflicts due to inept researchers who didn't check anything. I hacked off entire "trunks" due to false bloodlines (usually to Revolutionary heroes, nobility, notables, etc.)
Let's get real here: obituaries were published in newspapers! Newspapers are periodicals designed to last only as long as you read them, and then you wrap fish in them and toss them on the fireplace! Don't get so precious about these fleeting words. Because many people will care far too much, preserve them with undue care, and we'll be worse off than before.
magicmicah85 · 3d ago
You only live as long as the last person to remember you. Now the internet is going to make us all immortal as our descendants research the family tree.
JohnMakin · 3d ago
There's another outstanding use of obituaries - genealogy research.
My paternal grandfather had some issues with his racial lineage and left home at a very early age after his dad died to join the military to fight in Korea. For whatever reason he ended up adopting a name he was not born under - his father's - and kept it a secret his whole life and didn't tell a soul. it wasn't uncovered what he had done until decades later when his mother died and his birth certificate was found in her belongings.
When trying to figure out who his dad's family was, where no one in the family really had any idea and in the past they had a lot of incentive to hide their ancestry and keep their records inaccurate/incomplete (this was during one-drop law times, where people would hide marriages and assume fake identities all the time to avoid persecution). I was stuck for months until someone mentioned using newspapers.com archive to try to see if anything came up (not a plug, this service is genuinely amazing).
Jackpot! Public records often lie, but obituaries rarely do. I was able to piece together his paternal side's relatives via obituaries (who leave surviving relative names quite often) and found his precise lineage all the way back to the 1850's and before emancipation, something that is typically quite hard to do. Could not have possibly done it without obituaries.
ac2u · 2d ago
People are always surprised at what can be unearthed if you cast a wide net and start pulling on threads, even if only to rule certain threads out early on. Nice work.
dredmorbius · 3d ago
Obits are among my idea-stirring hacks. Some thoughts on why they work, and some similar ones.
Obits are written long in advance. I noticed following Jorge Bergoglio's death that NPR's obit was written (and voiced, in the newscast / headlines) by Silvia Poggioli, though she'd retired from the network in 2023 (here: <https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/1013050313/pope-francis-dead>). This means that they're both well-researched and polished writing, unlike most breaking news coverage. They also compress a lifetime into a few paragraphs (~75 in the case of Poggioli's article), which tends to bring out highlights.
Another format that often brings out interesting ideas, outside my own area of expertise: interviews. Especially with those not from the worlds of politics or mainstream business. All the better, historical interviews, from earlier times. These often give either perspectives on a different world, or a perspective on circumstances which presage the world we find ourselves in now.
Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" and the Studs Terkel archive are two particularly excellent examples. As I'm expanding my language comprehension, interviews and histories in foreign languages are another excellent option.
A third option: academic author interviews. The New Books Network has poor production values (bonus: well-produced audio is almost certainly a skippable ad) and a large number of duds, but where it hits the topics are almost always well outside the mainstream but at the same time the product of expertise. There's a huge back-catalogue:
A guy keeps going to the newsagent: he scans the headlines and then leaves.
The newsagent sees him do this a few days in a row and finds it to be strange behaviour, so one day he asks him:
“Comrade, what are you doing? Can I help you?”
“Thank you comrade, but I’m only interested in the obituaries.”
“But comrade, the obituaries are at the back!”
“Not the ones I am looking for, comrade!”
pavlov · 3d ago
This joke has its origins in the days when Soviet leadership was a series of men in their seventies who kept dying on the job.
It has acquired a certain acuity in today’s America where the leaders are a series of unpopular men approaching their eighties.
There is a widespread “Is He Dead Yet?” meme that’s the contemporary direct equivalent of the Soviet joke.
Applejinx · 3d ago
And Russia! Let's not forget the same holds there, for very good reasons. Particularly as they managed to be the leaders of the unpopular men leading America, and they're squandering what wealth Russia has in mad imperialism for purely ego reasons while also seeking to crash the US no matter what that does to the world economy. Pure table-flipping.
It's called the Swan Lake moment: Swan Lake on loop on the state media TV. That's what happens when everything is turmoil and nobody knows what will come next.
piyh · 3d ago
All I ask for are leaders born in the 1950s
jfengel · 3d ago
We just had a chance at one born in the 1960s. People decided that they wanted someone born in the 1940s.
dredmorbius · 3d ago
It refers specifically to Stalin.
And a time when the Chairmanship was not a revolving door, though it became more of one immediately afterward.
maximilianburke · 3d ago
What's old is new again.
gwern · 3d ago
> It’s not just about learning new facts, of course — it’s about asking questions. Why was a British mystic in Mexico City? How did Spanish-language television evolve in the U.S.? What led someone to invent PLAX or build search tools for financial news decades before Google? Even if you don’t find all the answers, just posing the questions helps you flex the creative muscle that thrives on curiosity and connection.
Maybe wait until you have at least 1 anecdote, anywhere in the history of the world, of major creativity from reading an obituary, before recommending it?
flufluflufluffy · 3d ago
Goddang, it’s not like they’re giving medical advice or anything, it’s simply about being exposed to novel concepts and ideas, which fosters creativity. You don’t really need “evidence” for this, but even if somehow it’s wrong and reading obituaries either somehow does not increase or decreases creativity, is not like there’s harm in saying “Hey, try reading some obituaries, you might learn some interesting stuff”
crazygringo · 3d ago
But that's not what they're saying. They're claiming it's a creativity hack, not that you might learn some interesting stuff. That's the entire thesis of the post... which isn't backed up at all.
kenjackson · 3d ago
Does there exist anything related to creativity that is backed up with clear data? This article is as convincing as anything else I’ve ever read about increasing creativity.
gwern · 3d ago
There's lots of legitimate research related to creativity which could be discussed: the existence of the 'incubation effect' and sleep effects, the inefficacy of the popular forms of 'brainstorming' compared to the more painful forms that work*, the 'near adjacent', the 'equal-odds rule', the benefits of cognitive/ideological diversity (and lack of benefits of certain other kinds of diversity), the correlation with intelligence and personality traits like Openness...
As opposed to OP. Which adduces so little evidence for the claim about reading obituaries that a rando like me could actually write a more persuasive argument for the benefits of reading obituaries (because I at least wrote one thing tenuously inspired by reading an obituary the other month: https://gwern.net/traffic-lights ).
Even the most shameless periodical usually tries for at least 3 anecdotes, no matter how dubious and strained, before declaring it the hot new trend or It Is Known fact.
* One of Sawyer's research topics, as it happens.
tomjakubowski · 1d ago
Interesting article, thanks. As a frequent city walker and cyclist, I also spend a lot of time thinking about why drivers run reds. It's rarely as simple as "drivers are too aggressive" or "drivers aren't paying attention", the real cause is often more complicated.
I don't know if the concept of "point of no return" is really such an obscure thing. It was part of my standard Illinois drivers education in the mid-00s. Every drive I did with the instructor he'd ask me to call it out when we approached a signal.
pkkm · 3d ago
> the inefficacy of the popular forms of 'brainstorming' compared to the more painful forms that work
Interesting, what's your recommended resource for learning more about this?
gwern · 2d ago
I don't know if I'd recommend it, but checking, Sawyer's _Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration_ book hits most of the points I'd cite about brainstorming in its chapter, so you could always start there.
pkkm · 2d ago
Thanks!
kenjackson · 3d ago
What was the groundbreaking creative that came out of this?
gwern · 2d ago
None. But then, that's still more than OP was able to adduce, as they provided no examples at all, neither groundbreaking nor creative. Which is my point: the bar of 'an anecdote' is so very low. You can provide a anecdote for the creative value of smelling rotten apples in a drawer (Schiller); you can provide an anecdote for the creative value of drinking 50 coffees a day (Balzac); you can provide an anecdote for countless crazy things people have done! But you can't provide an anecdote about reading obituaries?
dingnuts · 2d ago
self promotion is gross, Gwern. It's obvious you are only commenting to drive more traffic and attention to your own blog or you'd be able to resist linking it.
You have been extremely insulated by your Bitcoin wealth and have an over inflated sense of self. Get a job. Get a life.
You are in fact a rando with too much time on your hands and too much to say about things you know too little about.
PhearTheCeal · 3d ago
> Complex training courses, meditation and cultural exposure were most effective (gs = 0.66), while the use of cognitive manipulation drugs was least and also non-effective, g = 0.10. The type of training material was also important. For instance, figural methods were more effective in enhancing creativity, and enhancing converging thinking was more effective than enhancing divergent thinking.
reading the obits might fall under "cultural exposure".
jldugger · 3d ago
It depends on how you define creativity probably, but a few scientific examples:
1. "Functional fixedness" was explored in a classic Candle Problem[1] found that high drive (ie rewards on a deadline) led to fewer subjects solving the problem.
2. Quality versus quantity. Sadly I can't find the TED talk (likely a decade ago?) that I saw about this but the basic idea: give subjects some kind of design problem (paper airplanes, egg drop, bridge building) and a metric measure them by. Then split them into two groups; one you measure on how many they build and the other on how well their final product is. I think there may have been some intermediate evaluation step as well, wish I could find the original research. Paradoxically, the quantity group wins on quality scores. Lesson being not to focus on perfecting your first solution.
I don't think anyone is asking for a double-blind study conducted by accredited scientists from multiple leading institutions on a sample of a quarter-million people across decades getting published on the front page of Science here.
We, since I will gladly agree with the criticism and add myself to that side, are asking for one example of the supposedly creativity-inducing action to have even perhaps tangentially produced some sort of creative insight.
As an example I would submit that the simple advice of "take a walk/shower" has much better attestation for prompting creativity than "read the obituaries". It hardly seems like a stretch to ask the author to provide even a single example of this achieving something.
Applejinx · 3d ago
I invent new things on a weekly basis for years on end to make a living on Patreon, and literally have to unfailingly hack creativity or starve. (my choices of working in open source leave me no alternative as I don't get persistent revenue streams beyond what I'm able to continue to create.)
Everything the author said about creativity checked out from my experience, except that I'm not working in such a generalist field that obituaries light up relevant 'unrelated associations' for me. However, it seems completely plausible from my perspective.
crazygringo · 3d ago
Completely agreed. It's just irresponsibly bad writing to claim "this can boost your creativity!" without even a single example of how it has boosted yours or someone else's. I don't need a scientific study, but surely you can give at least a single anecdotal example? Because if you can't, you honestly shouldn't be writing this in the first place.
codingdave · 3d ago
If it helps them, that seems sufficient reason to share what works for them. I'd say that a more kind critique would be that their advice could be expanded to: "Read anything" in order to get creativity going. But gatekeeping advice unless they can cite "major creativity" that came from it seems harsh.
crazygringo · 3d ago
When they claim up front that it's a "creativity hack", yes I expect would expect them to back it up. That's not gatekeeping or harsh, it's literally the one job of an article to back up its claim.
No comments yet
hammock · 3d ago
Huh?
Obits are mini bios, but better than living bios, and more accessible than bestselling bios that make you think you have to be Rockefeller or Lincoln
gwern · 2d ago
I enjoy reading obituaries, for a number of reasons. (Mostly in the NYT, but also, of course, the famous Economist obits.) But I rarely have ever gotten any creative ideas from them, and I do not recall hearing about anyone else doing so either.
And I object in principle to telling silly stories about desirable activities to try to justify them. This is how we get bad ideas like 'Mozart for babies' or 'we should make kids play chess because it correlates with being smarter'. Chess should be played for its intrinsic value, because if it can only be justified by its instrumental value in raising IQ or grades, the case for that was weak, much weaker than its proponents were willing to admit, and has since turned out to be false - but along the way, wasted a lot of time and money and made a lot of kids miserable playing a game they didn't like, and the proponents just made the world a worse place by wasting all those resources, filling the literature with useless analyses and research on chess correlates, and decreasing public trust in science.
billfruit · 3d ago
I think its hardly that much of an interesting idea. Reading wide ofcourse is useful and interesting. But I doubt reading obituaries are the best way to go about that.
One approach that I often do, is to go to fivebooks.com when an any random subject or topic strikes me and then try to read the books their interviewees have recommended on that topic. I have found many interesting books in this way.
Like their lists about the Spanish Civil war lead me to 'Forging of a Rebel' by Arturo Barea.
Another source is to look into famous/interesting peoples reading lists. Many famous people including Gandhi, Tolstoy and others kept lists of all books that they read.
kristianp · 3d ago
What a great website fivebooks is! But as you say, you need to make an effort to find something different on there. A randomiser might be good there.
kayo_20211030 · 3d ago
I like obits as much as the next person, maybe more. But the premise of the piece very much depends on a particular definition of creativity; and then tries, and fails, to extend it to reading obits. If it's defined as something novel, then a priori it can't be obvious and therefore is likely to be an association between distant concepts - a statement of the obvious. Mednick might be right; but an extrapolation to obits, as in the original piece, is unjustified, and definitely unproven. Velcro wasn't invented because someone read an obit; it's good, impressive, but just regular creativity. Gentner posits an obvious truism, but its relationship to obits is tenuous at best, again unjustified, and just probably wrong.
The whole piece would be begging the question were there a question. It's a statement of faith.
Wistar · 3d ago
I have a lifelong friend who is a very successful investor and who has been habitually reading obits since his high school days. I recall his explaining that obits served as an opportunity radar.
djeastm · 3d ago
Can you elaborate on how? Besides the obvious of seeking out a bereaved family member and purchasing their home/belongings on the cheap, of course
Applejinx · 3d ago
I don't do it, but consider this: obituaries are clearly capsules of what people consider valuable and worthy about a person. This has nothing to do with whether they're true, or plausible: they're little windows into what one would consider surpassingly important.
It's like the saying about the Velvet Underground: 'very few people came to their concerts but everyone who did, started a band'.
Wistar · 2d ago
I can't remember exactly what he said but it was something along the lines of staying aware of the changes in the community.
eru · 3d ago
You can also look for companies with leadership transition.
ChrisMarshallNY · 3d ago
> one popular piece of advice for boosting creativity is to learn something new every day. But here’s the catch: This only works if that new information is very different from what’s already in your head.
This is a good distinction.
I make it a point to hang with folks from vastly different backgrounds from me.
I can get some very good (and bad) ideas from them.
My father unexpectedly passed away a few years ago so this stuff is especially close to my heart.
I’ve learned a lot from lives of others so think this is wonderful advice for finding gems and remembering the normal goodness that exists in this world.
When the notable figures of our day pass away, they wind up on our screens, short clips documenting their achievements, talking heads discussing their influence. The quiet lives, though, pass on soundlessly in the background. And yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.
androng · 3d ago
i like this advice. when trying to come up with new characters for fiction its very difficult to come up with something you don't already know but with this you have real people with their entire life story summarized for free.
Animats · 3d ago
There are biographies, of course.
One striking thing about reading biographies is that real people are seldom "chosen ones". That's a literature and movie trope.
pnw · 3d ago
Interestingly the second person listed has their own Wikipedia page.
also, if you read them daily, once you have read the day's section: If you are not in it, you have the rest of that day to do what you want!
badmonster · 3d ago
such a simple, beautiful hack - using life stories from unexpected places to stretch your mind and spark creative leaps you’d never plan for.
kazinator · 3d ago
Whenever I see a "X has died" subject on the front page of HN, I invoke a personal rule that if I haven't heard of the person, I skip it. You dying shouldn't be what gets my attention.
Of course, there are long dead historic figures that we know about. But being dead is rarely the very first thing you learn about them.
chairmansteve · 3d ago
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...
Max Planck
taubek · 3d ago
In my country obituaries like the ones in the picture are not published often. Maybe for some diginaties, in a form of necrologue.
fedeb95 · 3d ago
related advice: go to your local library and look at books in fields you don't know anything about. Find the most unusual book cover and title (compared to the others in the same section). That's usually something you want to read.
Works best in big libraries.
Triphibian · 3d ago
The obituary they run in the back of The Economist is an excellent place to start.
fnord77 · 3d ago
wouldn't biographies (or cliffs notes of biographies) be better?
fedeb95 · 3d ago
the reason this works is the same as why HN is a good news source (with its limitations). No sponsored likes, just as people pay to submit obituaries. High range of topics, even if HN is narrower. So, it tells more about your usual search engine than about obituaries. For instance, that's why I prefer duckduckgo to google.
thesuitonym · 2d ago
If you think HN is immune to purchasing consent, I have some real estate to sell you.
fedeb95 · 2d ago
that was my impression. Well, maybe paid content was more appealing to me!
BenFranklin100 · 3d ago
Reading in the obits? Perfect for our TikTok attention span culture.
Back in the day, we would read a biography or at least the damn Wikipedia article.
EA-3167 · 2d ago
What about reading one means you can't read the other? Did I miss something in the article that demanded you ONLY read obituaries?
https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/obituary-rot.html
> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.
Newspaper's used to have strong local coverage and a collection of vignettes into the outside world. The way the author uses the obituaries is the way I used to use the newspapers. Getting multiple newspapers (and magazines) from all over the world was a fixture for New York City creative offices pre-internet.
None of those are guaranteed to be around in 50 years, but hopefully it helps a little.
However in certain aspects of preservation of History (for example if deemed high value at a national level) we should also expect national archives to duplicate the effort to preserve this and other information with historic value.
It is much harder to doctor hard copies of newspapers or books. You can burn them, but altering them is a complicated challenge, and someone may own another copy of the originals.
With digital records, the temptation is stronger because the editing is easier, and other "unofficial" copies that diverge from the officially archived version may be declared to be fake/misinformation etc.
First, the rule used to be that they could crawl all Danish sites or having interest to Danish government (so I guess also news reports of Denmark or discussion in other nations) ignoring robots.txt, which yes I found that to be a very wrong headed rule but that's what it was. So obviously they need to put in a good deal of effort to get content into the archives that would be getting blocked otherwise.
At the same time governmental records, including the records and cases in communities around the country get added to archives (but of course are only available to scholars at some future date)
So theoretically this is a lot of data. I suppose other national archives probably have similar rules and situations.
It would seem unlikely that one could rewrite history easily with so much data, without alerting people to what you were doing. But I guess that is actually the lesson of Fascism, they don't care if you see what they're doing.
They will do it and then hope you forget how it got to be like it is.
I am not sure if any currently used timestamping algorithm remains unbroken in 2100 or so.
You: "you just defined conservative"
Me: "yes, that's conservative"
You: "how do you define conservative?"
My reaction: ??????
If you need 3rd grade simplified reductions like you just posted, we cannot continue here. Divorce from reality and truth is why your party lost trust with intelligent voters and must appeal to emotion and crisis to rally support, ultimately losing elections. Congratulations
It was 312 vs 226 votes, including seven swing states, and got the popular vote. I guess to make ourselves feel better we’ll just say an extremely thin margin. But as long as it’s with a nod and wink; kind of like saying that alligators also fly, just extremely, extremely low.
IDK if this counts as landslide in the American sense. I mostly heard that expression used for results of European elections.
Edit: instant downvote, didn't even take a minute from the original posting! Wow.
Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics. The fact that Trump got 312 electoral votes to Harris' 226 is just that, a fact. It does not reflect any subjective attitudes or preferences of anyone taking part in this discussion, wisdom or idiocy of current White House policies etc.
Out of 538 votes, in 2024, Trump had 312; in 2020, Biden had 306, just a few less, and Trump had 304 in 2016, only 8 less than his "landslide". In 2012, Obama had 332 and in 2008, he had 365. Clinton had 370 and 379. I wouldn't call any of those landslides though.
GHW Bush had 426 which is quite a lot, but Reagan before him had 489 and then 525. Those are landslides.
Nixon got 301 the first time, which is just a win; but he got 520 in his second term. That was a landslide.
I would draw a line in the sand at 90% of the electoral vote is a landslide, and anything less is puffery. Ranked by percentage of electors, Trump's "landslide" is only 44 out of 60. That's the saddest landslide ever. 58% of electors is a clear and undebatable win, but it's not a landslide and it's not a mandate, or even a large margin. It might be an indictment of the Democratic Party or some other lesser hyperbole though.
The absence of electoral landslides in recent years implies both parties are better tuned and optimized now. Their data collection to enable a "winning campaign platform" is probably much better now, resulting in close elections.
They want to share the spoils of victory with as few as possible. Winning with a big margin, to the party apparatus, is evidence that you wasted valuable political capital on pleasing voters that could instead have been spent on pleasing donors.
However, I am sensitive about shoe-horning political talking points into a conversation.
Personally, I am more to the right than to the left, but I don't enjoy the clusterfuck of the current administration at all, doubly so because our local security (a small NATO member which used to be subjugated to Moscow) has been thrown into total uncertainty.
Biden was 51.3 to Trump’s 46.8 in 2020.
This was not a landslide. Trump did not get the majority of votes.
He has much less of a “mandate” than Biden did.
When my father died we got a 'complementary' online posting from the funeral home for ~1 year (for funeral/service details), but I also made the effort to pay to put one in the newspaper for posterity.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
Mind I can get behind the genealogy argument, yet feel that our post-life records being accessible by default is not an assumption we can make unilaterally.
The historical record is important and we don't know what will be useful to future generations.
Take Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms as an example. It briefly recounts the multiple legal proceedings that the Roman Catholic Church brought against a humble Italian Renaissance-era miller who spread strange, heretical ideas about the cosmos (involving the cheese that was apparently the moon's substance and the worms that ate it). Ginzburg draws on Church records, including the man's own written defense, and builds a fascinating picture of his mental world, intellect, and disposition.
If I remember correctly, these small, cloudy windows into the Early Modern past even let Ginzburg identify likely traces of pre-Christian, or folk, traditions largely hidden from the written record.
This is a funny example, I suppose, because in all likelihood the miller would have been tickled to know that his ideas survived and found an audience not just despite but because of Church persecution.
Still, his case nicely illustrates the importance and unpredictable value of the historical record.
> inaccessible to future generations
No, it's not going to go down this way.
Here's what currently happens: obit links get passed around among friends, family, loved ones. Anyone who catches wind of a death and is remotely interested in family history/geneaology is going to archive it and plug it in somewhere. Such as Find-a-Grave, ancestry.com, etc. Ancestry themselves should be actively indexing all these obits and such.
Digital obits will last so long that you will hate them forever, and curse the day they wrote yours.
Because here's what's going to happen next: every "data point" in those obits will be plugged into databases. Family Trees, Find-a-Grave Memorials, personal ancestral files. Those will be indexed, searchable, and every single factoid will be repeated and reduplicated and copy-pasted in perpetuity.
https://m.xkcd.com/2106/
Unfortunately, anyone who reads obits and knows some family history also knows that obits are riddled with errors. Sometimes they're deliberate! Sometimes they misdirect or protect the innocent, minors, whatever. Sometimes they're spiteful and sometimes they're simply papering over scandal with something anodyne.
So you've got a 95% true obituary that's being traded and scraped and plugged into databases, and those 5% falsehoods are going to multiply like a pernicious cancer.
Once I delved into my family tree, I found that most of my effort and resources were in disproving connections, removing sources, and reconciling conflicts due to inept researchers who didn't check anything. I hacked off entire "trunks" due to false bloodlines (usually to Revolutionary heroes, nobility, notables, etc.)
Let's get real here: obituaries were published in newspapers! Newspapers are periodicals designed to last only as long as you read them, and then you wrap fish in them and toss them on the fireplace! Don't get so precious about these fleeting words. Because many people will care far too much, preserve them with undue care, and we'll be worse off than before.
My paternal grandfather had some issues with his racial lineage and left home at a very early age after his dad died to join the military to fight in Korea. For whatever reason he ended up adopting a name he was not born under - his father's - and kept it a secret his whole life and didn't tell a soul. it wasn't uncovered what he had done until decades later when his mother died and his birth certificate was found in her belongings.
When trying to figure out who his dad's family was, where no one in the family really had any idea and in the past they had a lot of incentive to hide their ancestry and keep their records inaccurate/incomplete (this was during one-drop law times, where people would hide marriages and assume fake identities all the time to avoid persecution). I was stuck for months until someone mentioned using newspapers.com archive to try to see if anything came up (not a plug, this service is genuinely amazing).
Jackpot! Public records often lie, but obituaries rarely do. I was able to piece together his paternal side's relatives via obituaries (who leave surviving relative names quite often) and found his precise lineage all the way back to the 1850's and before emancipation, something that is typically quite hard to do. Could not have possibly done it without obituaries.
Obits are written long in advance. I noticed following Jorge Bergoglio's death that NPR's obit was written (and voiced, in the newscast / headlines) by Silvia Poggioli, though she'd retired from the network in 2023 (here: <https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/1013050313/pope-francis-dead>). This means that they're both well-researched and polished writing, unlike most breaking news coverage. They also compress a lifetime into a few paragraphs (~75 in the case of Poggioli's article), which tends to bring out highlights.
Another format that often brings out interesting ideas, outside my own area of expertise: interviews. Especially with those not from the worlds of politics or mainstream business. All the better, historical interviews, from earlier times. These often give either perspectives on a different world, or a perspective on circumstances which presage the world we find ourselves in now.
Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" and the Studs Terkel archive are two particularly excellent examples. As I'm expanding my language comprehension, interviews and histories in foreign languages are another excellent option.
A third option: academic author interviews. The New Books Network has poor production values (bonus: well-produced audio is almost certainly a skippable ad) and a large number of duds, but where it hits the topics are almost always well outside the mainstream but at the same time the product of expertise. There's a huge back-catalogue:
<https://newbooksnetwork.com/>
A guy keeps going to the newsagent: he scans the headlines and then leaves.
The newsagent sees him do this a few days in a row and finds it to be strange behaviour, so one day he asks him:
“Comrade, what are you doing? Can I help you?”
“Thank you comrade, but I’m only interested in the obituaries.”
“But comrade, the obituaries are at the back!”
“Not the ones I am looking for, comrade!”
It has acquired a certain acuity in today’s America where the leaders are a series of unpopular men approaching their eighties.
There is a widespread “Is He Dead Yet?” meme that’s the contemporary direct equivalent of the Soviet joke.
It's called the Swan Lake moment: Swan Lake on loop on the state media TV. That's what happens when everything is turmoil and nobody knows what will come next.
And a time when the Chairmanship was not a revolving door, though it became more of one immediately afterward.
Maybe wait until you have at least 1 anecdote, anywhere in the history of the world, of major creativity from reading an obituary, before recommending it?
As opposed to OP. Which adduces so little evidence for the claim about reading obituaries that a rando like me could actually write a more persuasive argument for the benefits of reading obituaries (because I at least wrote one thing tenuously inspired by reading an obituary the other month: https://gwern.net/traffic-lights ).
Even the most shameless periodical usually tries for at least 3 anecdotes, no matter how dubious and strained, before declaring it the hot new trend or It Is Known fact.
* One of Sawyer's research topics, as it happens.
I don't know if the concept of "point of no return" is really such an obscure thing. It was part of my standard Illinois drivers education in the mid-00s. Every drive I did with the instructor he'd ask me to call it out when we approached a signal.
Interesting, what's your recommended resource for learning more about this?
You have been extremely insulated by your Bitcoin wealth and have an over inflated sense of self. Get a job. Get a life.
You are in fact a rando with too much time on your hands and too much to say about things you know too little about.
from https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/items/a8357c0b-1e41-4eff-8ad1-fe3b...
reading the obits might fall under "cultural exposure".
1. "Functional fixedness" was explored in a classic Candle Problem[1] found that high drive (ie rewards on a deadline) led to fewer subjects solving the problem.
2. Quality versus quantity. Sadly I can't find the TED talk (likely a decade ago?) that I saw about this but the basic idea: give subjects some kind of design problem (paper airplanes, egg drop, bridge building) and a metric measure them by. Then split them into two groups; one you measure on how many they build and the other on how well their final product is. I think there may have been some intermediate evaluation step as well, wish I could find the original research. Paradoxically, the quantity group wins on quality scores. Lesson being not to focus on perfecting your first solution.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_problem
We, since I will gladly agree with the criticism and add myself to that side, are asking for one example of the supposedly creativity-inducing action to have even perhaps tangentially produced some sort of creative insight.
As an example I would submit that the simple advice of "take a walk/shower" has much better attestation for prompting creativity than "read the obituaries". It hardly seems like a stretch to ask the author to provide even a single example of this achieving something.
Everything the author said about creativity checked out from my experience, except that I'm not working in such a generalist field that obituaries light up relevant 'unrelated associations' for me. However, it seems completely plausible from my perspective.
No comments yet
Obits are mini bios, but better than living bios, and more accessible than bestselling bios that make you think you have to be Rockefeller or Lincoln
And I object in principle to telling silly stories about desirable activities to try to justify them. This is how we get bad ideas like 'Mozart for babies' or 'we should make kids play chess because it correlates with being smarter'. Chess should be played for its intrinsic value, because if it can only be justified by its instrumental value in raising IQ or grades, the case for that was weak, much weaker than its proponents were willing to admit, and has since turned out to be false - but along the way, wasted a lot of time and money and made a lot of kids miserable playing a game they didn't like, and the proponents just made the world a worse place by wasting all those resources, filling the literature with useless analyses and research on chess correlates, and decreasing public trust in science.
One approach that I often do, is to go to fivebooks.com when an any random subject or topic strikes me and then try to read the books their interviewees have recommended on that topic. I have found many interesting books in this way.
Like their lists about the Spanish Civil war lead me to 'Forging of a Rebel' by Arturo Barea.
Another source is to look into famous/interesting peoples reading lists. Many famous people including Gandhi, Tolstoy and others kept lists of all books that they read.
The whole piece would be begging the question were there a question. It's a statement of faith.
It's like the saying about the Velvet Underground: 'very few people came to their concerts but everyone who did, started a band'.
This is a good distinction.
I make it a point to hang with folks from vastly different backgrounds from me.
I can get some very good (and bad) ideas from them.
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2009/08/13/benson
https://archive.ph/9tM1P
My father unexpectedly passed away a few years ago so this stuff is especially close to my heart.
I’ve learned a lot from lives of others so think this is wonderful advice for finding gems and remembering the normal goodness that exists in this world.
One striking thing about reading biographies is that real people are seldom "chosen ones". That's a literature and movie trope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Garfinkle
Of course, there are long dead historic figures that we know about. But being dead is rarely the very first thing you learn about them.
Max Planck
Works best in big libraries.
Back in the day, we would read a biography or at least the damn Wikipedia article.