"...he supports objective debates about it, as though such a thing were possible, let alone useful."
Maybe a more fair statement is a debate about such a thing could not happen and would be useless within public digital forums like Twitter. To say there is a subject that exists that cannot be debated objectively at all is censorship. Some subjects require a higher curation of debate context than others in order to have a good-faith discussion, this being one of them. If your goal is to maximize the well-being of everyone, then somewhere in the transitive chain truth and understanding would also be your goal. Censorship is the antithesis to truth and understanding.
As though *truth* of the matter could be achieved....
Intelligence is an embodied, socio-culturally inflected manifestation. It's something applied. It doesn't have some objective meaning outside of a Kuhnian paradigm of science, at best. The idea that intelligence can be determined as 'true objective property' is a folk concept, borne from a modernist belief in positivism.
Intelligence can certainly be gauged in terms of useful problems or applied knowledge, but the bounds and properties of that are entirely situated in a cultural context defined by particular epistemologies - but this doesn't leave us with any type of "truth" separated from cultural context. This doesn't mean that useful theories can't be constructed about it - but the way Susskind and his ilk isn't discuss it isn't in any way that recognises these subjectivities. Indeed, a 'truth' about intelligence is exactly the kind of reasoning that justified every phrenologist, every racial biologist and every slave-owning subjugator. This isn't censorship - it's a recognition of the fallacy of arguing for truth of such a matter.
"...he supports objective debates about it, as though such a thing were possible, let alone useful."
Maybe a more fair statement is a debate about such a thing could not happen and would be useless within public digital forums like Twitter. To say there is a subject that exists that cannot be debated objectively at all is censorship. Some subjects require a higher curation of debate context than others in order to have a good-faith discussion, this being one of them. If your goal is to maximize the well-being of everyone, then somewhere in the transitive chain truth and understanding would also be your goal. Censorship is the antithesis to truth and understanding.
As though *truth* of the matter could be achieved....
Intelligence is an embodied, socio-culturally inflected manifestation. It's something applied. It doesn't have some objective meaning outside of a Kuhnian paradigm of science, at best. The idea that intelligence can be determined as 'true objective property' is a folk concept, borne from a modernist belief in positivism.
Intelligence can certainly be gauged in terms of useful problems or applied knowledge, but the bounds and properties of that are entirely situated in a cultural context defined by particular epistemologies - but this doesn't leave us with any type of "truth" separated from cultural context. This doesn't mean that useful theories can't be constructed about it - but the way Susskind and his ilk isn't discuss it isn't in any way that recognises these subjectivities. Indeed, a 'truth' about intelligence is exactly the kind of reasoning that justified every phrenologist, every racial biologist and every slave-owning subjugator. This isn't censorship - it's a recognition of the fallacy of arguing for truth of such a matter.