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Youngest Sibling

Youngest Sibling

There is (or was, a few years ago) a thing called “the youngest sibling effect” – or something like that. The idea is that the oldest is smart: he has to teach the second, and the second has to teach the third, on down to the last. * They all learn, because you have to put your thoughts in order to explain things. The last one has no one to teach, so doesn’t learn so well. The nuclear physicist Richard Feynman touched on then this when he said that if you couldn’t explain a concept to a fairly bright high school student, you didn’t understand it yourself. It’s an old concept. Heinlein uses it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The protagonist hires a teacher whose first question is, “Well, what are we going to learn this time?”
I Have also had it happen to me. I was with this fairly bright administrator at work and commented that it was pretty neat that you could just look at heavy equipment axle assemblies and know how many planetary gears each one had—large ones, four, smaller ones only three – just by counting the bosses on the outside of the castings. Then I had to explain why you need planetary gears on the axles instead of just one really big ring and pinion.
The thing about that is, I didn’t fully understand it myself until I put it into words.
*This doesn’t apply to my younger brother, who was simply unteachable.

Steve Coquet
12/02/2017

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