Still worse than a computer, since they can't take feedback on words that you've learned better. It only works if your learning rates for different words are what the tape maker expected.

Also this won't work for the end run of spaced repetition where a well-practiced card might pop up a year after it was last reviewed. The long-lived cards are going to be a very eclectic mix. Then again, school courses usually don't expect you to retain the stuff from each course past the duration of the course, so this isn't that much of a shortcoming for education.

We're already drowning in inert content, I don't see how adding more would help. We've had a way to get something like the martial art of rationality since ancient Athens, which is structured interaction with an actual human mentor who knows how to engage with the surrounding world and can teach and train other people with face-to-face interaction. This thing isn't mechanizable, like arithmetic or algebra is, so simple interactive programs are not going to be much better than just a regular book. This also isn't a not mechanizable but still clearly delimited topic like wood-carving or playing tennis, so you can't even say you're unquestionably doing the thing when going it alone, even though you might do better with some professional training. What you're trying to teach is the human ability to observe an unexpected situation, make sense of it and respond sensibly to it at a level above baseline adult competency, and the one way we know how to teach that is to have someone competent in the thing you're trying to learn you can interact with.

Like, yeah, maybe this will help, but I can't help but feel that people are compulsively eating ice and this is planning an ice shavings machine for your kitchen instead of getting an appointment for for having your blood work done.

"What can we know about what happens to other people when they practice meditation" is a different (and important) question from "what is the best mindset for personally making progress with the practice of meditation" though.

The problem is that we think statements have a somewhat straightforward relation to reality because we can generally make sense of them quite easily. In reality it turns out that that ease comes from a lot of hidden work our brain does being smart on the spot every time it needs to fit a given sentence to the given state of reality, and nobody really appreciated this until people started trying to build AIs that do anything similar and repeatedly ended up with things with no ability to distinguish between things that are realistically plausible and incoherent nonsense.

I'm not really sure how to communicate this effectively beyond gesturing at the sorry history of the artificial intelligence research program from the 1950s onwards despite thousands of extremely clever people putting their minds to it. The sequences ESrogs suggests in the sibling reply also deal with stuff like this.

Your first problem is that you need a theory for just how do statements relate to the state of the world. Have you read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations?

Overall, this basically sounds like analytical philosophy plus 1970s style AI. Lots of people have probably figured this would be a nice thing to have, but once you drop out of the everyday understanding of language and try to get to the bottom of what's really going on, you end up in the same morass where AI research and modern philosophy are stuck in.

Let's say you're afflicted by a severe illness and have, say, 5 % odds of surviving. If you end up dying of it, all of your organs will be damaged beyond repair. However, as of now they're still fine and safe for organ donation. How do you feel about cutting to the chase and committing suicide right here and now so you can produce a fresh dead body with superior utilitarian value?

Stochastic time tracking is an interesting approach where you don't need to start and stop timers on your own. The system pings you at random intervals and you answer what you're currently doing. Then you count each sample point as the average sampling interval spent doing the task that was sampled.