Nitpick but it's "median" not "average".
> everybody has an "inner child", but most functioning adults have built layers
And that's the point where I'm scratching my head. What do people even mean by that? As I observe the "inner child" in others and then apply the new theory to myself it's freaking obvious that the adult part is doing all the reading, all the predicting, all the planning, all the outwitting of the child, all the building, all the self-updating, all the $dayjob. Who is writing this text? I am - the adult part. I am who has 99% of control of the communication at this moment. (At a different time the show can be 50% mine. Or 1%. But when writing, the inner child is mostly shunned, I think he cannot even write too well at all.)
And so I protest calling me "an outer shell" that you think you can just simply "re-learn". I am no shell. And I'm definitely not outside! I am the first class citizen, I just happen to have a very silent/weird/energetic/stupid/shy roommate. If I try less, he will have more control. If I try harder, he will have less. Balance. But the balance that is maintained solely by me, i.e. by the adult part - the inner child is not able to do that!
I largely agree with the essence of what you are saying, which is that there is no "inner child", although some people may be more capable of "reinventing the wheel" internally, which may allow for some new optimization for the overall structure.
“average
noun 1. a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number.“
the result you get by adding two or more amounts together and dividing the total by the number of amounts
Saying "literally" in place of "figuratively" and then referencing the Oxford dictionary (meaning C, look no further) is a cool way to troll, and to make a fool of oneself.
You're wrong, and you can see this by looking at any number of published news articles where more often than not, average is used to mean median. You can see this from the way that we use average to mean typical. 'Typical' features are more likely to be median or mode than arithmetic mean.
'Average' is itself a colloquialism, so the colloquial use is what's important.
¹ This makes "average" a particularly weird "false friend" vocable, because the average recipient might well take it to mean what you think it means, but might also understand it as a very closely related, but subtly different thing.
That's not necessarily true and for IQ I think it's only true because IQ measures are normalized to an average of 100 and a normal distribution with a set standard deviation.
For example if out of ten people nine perform at 100 %, and one performs at 95 %, then the average performance would be 99.5 % and 90 % of people would perform above average.
If you swap average for median, then these are true by definition which doesn't really tell us anything about the distributions (so the people by way of measurement) involved.
If fact, 50% of people perform below average! 50% of the population also have below average IQ.
> Actually no, some of us actually have our shit sorted out
> and are actual adults.
I believe that everybody has an "inner child", but most functioning adults have built layers around that inner self to enhance their behaviour to that of what we externally perceive as an "adult".
Proof that most people still have that inner child can be observed in some edge cases, such as under the influence of drugs, sleep/energy deprived, some mental deterioration conditions such as dementia - and many others. I think sometimes we see this too in viral videos where people behave strangely when presented in an unusual scenario. The mind just seems to go into a "default" mode.
I think for the most part, people generally run on auto-pilot. Like the so-called "muscle memory" for athletes, I believe something similar exists for most tasks a person completes day-to-day. Human behaviour more generally is likely doing this.
To that extent, is this seeming lack of adult-like behaviour simply a person that needs to relearn this "outer shell"? (Assuming they are also capable of doing so.)