Exactly. Maybe a better word is "spiraling", when it thinks it has the tools to figure something out but can't, and can't figure out why it can't, and keeps re-trying because it doesn't know what else to do.
Which is basically what happens when a person has an existential crisis -- something fundamental about the world seems to be broken, they can't figure out why, and they can't figure out why they can't figure it out, hence the crisis seems all-consuming without resolution.
There actually was quite a lot of suggestion that thoughts work like autocomplete. A lot of it was just considered niche, e.g. because the mathematical formalisms were beyond what most psychologist or even cognitive scientists would deem usefull.
Predictive coding theory was formalized back around 2010 and traces it roots up to theories by Helmholtz from 1860.
Predictive coding theory postulates that our brains are just very strong prediction machines, with multiple layers of predictive machinery, each predicting the next.
Look up predictive coding theory. According to that theory, what our brain does is in fact just autocomplete.
However, what it is doing is layered autocomplete on itself. I.e. one part is trying to predict what the other part will be producing and training itself on this kind of prediction.
What emerges from this layered level of autocompletes is what we call thought.
Tests usually do measure the speed. And often they should. But the question here is "the speed of what?". And how do you measure the speed without also measuring the speed of something else as an error?
If you just want to measure speed, we should clock the time the student gets up, until they get to the room where the test is, get's out his pen etc. So students get the same time to do all this.
We are now measuring the speed at which the student is able to do the test material including all the preparatory steps. Students who live further away or have slower cars will get worse grade, but we are just measuring speed, aren't we?
That is a deliberately stupid example, but it shows that is important to ask "speed of what?". When doing a physics exam, what do we want to include in our measurement? The time it takes the person to read an write? Or just the raw speed at which physics knowledge can be applied? What is error and what is measurement?
You can see it as measuring based on different criteria. Or you can see it as trying to get rid of sources of errors that may be vastly different for different students.
It would be great if we could reduce the sources of errors down to zero for everyone. But unfortunately humans are very stochastic in nature, so we cannot do this. But then there has to be an acceptable source of measurement error (typical distribution) and an unacceptable source of measurement error (atypical distribution) and to actually measure based on the same criteria, you need to measure differently based on what you believe the error to be.
Test theory is a very complex topic within psychology. But there is a lot of insight that you can gain into this based on psychological test theory.
One Problem is, that we first have to clearly define the construct that we want to measure with the test. That is not often clear and often underdefined. When designing a test, we also need to be clear about what external influences contribute to noise / error and which are created by the actual measurement. There never is a test that does not have a margin of error.
A simple / simplified example: When we measure IQ, we want to determine cognitive processing speed. So we need to have fixed time for the test. But people also may read the questions faster or slower. This is just a typical range, so when you look at actual IQ tests, they will not give a score (just the most likely score) but also a margin of error, and test theorists will be very unhappy if you don't take this margin of error seriously. Now take someone who is legally blind. That person will be far out of the margin of error of others. The margins of errors account for typical inter-personal and intra-personal (bad day, girlfriend broke up) etc occurrences. But this doesn't work here. So we try to fix this, and account for the new source of error differently, e.g. by giving more time.
So it highly depends on what you want to measure. If you are doing a test in CS, do you want to measure how well the student understood the material and how fast they can apply it? Or do you want to measure how fast the student could do an actual real-live coding task? Depending on what your answer is, you need a very different measurement strategy and you need to handle sources of error differently.
When looking at grades people usually account for these margins of errors intuitively. We don't just rely on grades when hiring, but also conduct interviews etc so we can get a clearer picture.
We look at the range of lengths that is typical for legs. And all these get to compete under typical conditions.
Now let's say someone has a leg length that is fairly outside of the typical range. Let's say someone has a leg length of zero. We let these athletes compete with each other as well with different conditions, but we don't really compare the results from the typical to the atypical group.
Just letting the cars set the light would not work for some of the plans with autonomous cars.
Currently with cars you need green-red periods. But some researchers are considering scenarios, where in the future the cars just reserve the intersection for a few seconds and then pass through. That would be a lot of flickering between green and red.
There are scenarios and simulations where they show that we can get a lot more (fuel and time) efficient if we just let cars pass by each other in these reserved time windows. In many of these scenarios cars just go over the intersection at full speed during their reserved time windows.
NOTE: I am just reporting on what I know other researchers are currently investigating and proposing. I am not saying I think this is a good idea. At least I would consider this a security nightmare, because hackers could very easily have cars crashing into each other at full speed. Also I would be very very worried passing through an intersection behind an autonomous car and just trusting that this car not only reserved their window, but also reserved some additional time for me.
> because hackers could very easily have cars crashing into each other at full speed.
Not just hackers. If we assume that cars would be weaving through the intersection at full speed, human drivers are going to do dumb stuff and cause high speed collisions. “Just fly through the intersection at 70 miles an hour… Follow the car in front of me… Make my left turn… CRASH.”
For that matter a dog running into the intersection is likely to cause a high speed collision. Implicit in the assumption that the time savings comes from this “fast flickering” and allowing cars to speed through the intersection in small windows is the fact that the safety margins are very small.
These "maddeningly repetitive questions" are exactly the internal issues that are being talked about. If they ask "why not" just let them ask.
It's not your job as a parent to 1) make sure your children are happy all the time 2) defend your decisions against all attacks.
I found that when children say "why not" repeatedly, they are actually saying "I am unhappy and want to find an argument to reconsider your stance". If you signal them that this is actually something to argue about, e.g. by repeatedly answering these questions, they will just play the game you are offering them.
I found that it's actually a good approach to only directly answer "why not" the first time, and to just answer it the second time by "I understand that you are unhappy about my decision. I have already explained it and will not explain it again. If you need help dealing with your unhappiness I will be there for you."
A lot of the maddening part of these questions is most often the parent not being able to deal with the unhappiness of the child. Once you accept that unhappiness is a natural part of life 1) this will be easier for you 2) you will model much better for your child how to deal with unhappiness.
