I see your point. However, viewed through the lens of Durkheim’s concept of anomie, rising divorce rates can be interpreted as reflecting a weakening/lack of attachment to established social norms surrounding commitment to marriage and the stability of the family unit.
If you can provide a little bit more rationale for why anomie more appropriately applies to dissolution of the third place specifically I would be happy to take a look at it though!
while that is one way to view divorce, these cards (and the practice questions) are focused on the test itself, which is not always reflective of the truth or of current feelings.
Hey @Dam_Doc. I saw you changed the definition of anomie here. We previously had something similar to your edit but purposefully changed it to match the definition of anomie provided by the AAMC practice exams.
Suggestion where it was changed:
@pkaps01 I think full definitions directly from practice exams or primary sources are better off in the extra section. Because trying to turn that exact definition into a cloze card honestly makes it bloated and wordy, which makes it harder to remember or students will just resort to blindly memorizing the words. Additionally, there is a difference between memorizing a technical definition and being able to summarize that concept into a more simple phrase in laymans terms. In the case of that card, I felt like it wasn’t a very effective card for learning or remembering. However, I am happy to defer to group consensus.
I understand your point. However, there is a distinction between a lack of attachment to social norms vs a lack of social norms themselves. The P/S section can be pretty tight on semantics and sometimes it’s tough to avoid definitions that are very close to the AAMC’s when trying to make sure we capture the concept.
This was the original rationale for the change:
Lmk what you think.
I think there are valid points made on both sides, and I do think there’s a way to thread the needle here:
At least as we’ve approached deck maintenance over the last many months or so, and how I’ve tried to onboard new maintainers, we’ve tried to hew to a couple of ideas:
- Do not want to just copy-and-paste textbook phrasing entirely. It sounds robotic, and stilted, and often it’s entirely too wordy and it just doesn’t translate super well to flash cards.
- When in doubt, though, we do want to hew to some of the language used in primary sources. The way I think of this is trying to separate editing from editorialization. It’s easy to quibble over phrasing, and no doubt there’s value there at times, but by hewing a bit closer to phrasing used in primary sources I think we can dodge some of the clutter and potential pitfalls of users, and maintainers, being responsible for sentence structure, phrasing, syntax, etc. A lot of other little things that introduce weird judgement calls and whatnot (and, to a notable degree, avoids potential sources of confusion and disagreement).
Neither of these are absolutes, of course, but the TL; DR I’ve tried to take is that flashcards are not carbon-copies of a textbook (that’s gross), but they should, all things being equal, hew toward a kind of economical (though human) nod toward the phrasing used in primary sources when feasible.
This has struck me as being especially important as the deck grows, we have more new folks coming into the fold, and contributing, and maintaining, and we want to create systems and habits that scale well across many individuals, workflows, styles, and all the rest. A sort of insurance policy for encouraging mindful approach.
Super TL; DR: no exact quotations, but kindly distillations of the concept/idea while making sure to nod to, honor, some of the base language used in primary sources for accuracy and to avoid potential pitfalls in introducing human judgement errors (editorialization). Distillation, I think, captures the idea well at the end of the day.
In this way we act as a conduit between users and the MCAT, and our role is kindly facilitators of that process of introduction without delving too hard into unilateral authorship ourselves.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have gone far too long without my morning coffee and the situation has become nothing short of dire 
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(edit: that emoji looks more like soup than coffee, tbh)