Expert response heuristic for prompt writing

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The expert response heuristic for prompt writing says that when writing spaced repetition prompts, the prompt should be answerable by an expert in the subject who knows the material very well but hasn't read the exact same source material you read. This forces prompts to be phrased in "timeless/contextless" ways that don't rely on a particular source material.

Pros:

  • people can have different mental representations for the same object, and I think this heuristic encourages freedom in having these different representations (it's sort of similar to the heuristic of how, if you can get the right answer, then it doesn't matter how you solved it).
  • easier to share cards with others. It's annoying to use prompts someone else has written for material that you basically know well, but the prompt writer used a different source text or a source text you don't particularly care for, and then you're sort of forced to memorize contingent facts about the source material instead of facts about the subject in general.

Cons:

  • specific phrasing used in one source material can get stuck in one's verbal loop, such that it's easier to memorize when one allows such phrases to be used as crutches? it seems fine to allow that.

My current feeling is that maybe half of one's cards should be like this, while the other half can be more about specific source material.