That’s a fair perspective but consider that spaced-repetition can be an “MVP” of the broader concept of adaptive / personalized learning. You track some state about your knowledge of the world, in this case your performance on a flash card, and optimize the next piece of educational content around it.
It feels obvious to me that, in theory, we could do a lot more to leverage your current world knowledge to recommend the next piece of educational content, to optimize not just your understanding but also other things like how engaged you are. For example, a system could throw you an easier question if it helps you focus longer.
When I see the state of current interview prep it’s mostly “here’s a big list of questions” , perhaps tagged by difficulty and grouped under related topics such as “graph problems” or “tree problems” but I’m personally convinced a more sophisticated system could serve you the best possible next problem to stretch your brain in the right way.
Spaced rep is simply the proven starting point. The rest of adaptive learning has a bit of a troubled past because it was trendy to VCs , but pushed on educators and presented more as an alternative to a teacher rather than something to augment a teacher. I worked for a company that raised 100M+ to work on it but the CEO was great at terms sheets but uninterested in actually building a great education project.
But the reason that I joined the company was the high level idea still resonates with me. Surely many HN users have a big list of things they want to learn- perhaps about LLMs. But a typical course will have zero knowledge on where you’re starting as a student . It might bore you with stuff you know already or take for granted key prerequisites and skip them.
Anyway, I’m currently building my own adaptive learning platform but focused on helping professional poker players learn game theory . My idea being that it’s an easier ed tech app to bootstrap as the knowledge very directly translates to money. And really the same criticism applies because you can’t truly memorize a game tree , it’s more important that you build a high level conceptual understanding. But , as much as rote memorization deserves to be maligned when done in isolation, it’s not so bad when done as part of a broader learning strategy. For example, you can’t memorize vocab to learn Spanish but certainly knowing 5000 words in Spanish is a very nice starting point compared to not knowing any words. And tools like spaced rep have been proven by research to help with that goal and I view as a pathway to more broad adaptive learning strategies.