Very interesting, thanks!

I'll have more to say about the role of verbal reasoning ability in math later on

When you do, I hope you'll mention Paul Halmos, one of my favorite mathematicians (and the author, among many other things, of Naive Set Theory, which is on the MIRI reading list), who famously began his autobiography with the sentence "I like words more than numbers, and I always did."

People who are able to pick the correct choice at all can usually do so within 2 minutes – the questions have the character "either you see it or you don't."

Contrary data point here: I eventually figured out the "correct" answer (in the sense of the answer that everyone else came up with), but it took me something like 15-20 minutes (including interruptions by various distractions, such as reading subsequent paragraphs -- which I'm glad I did, because it allowed me to discover that the test was untimed, which is what gave me the confidence to try to figure it out!).

A reasonable amount of intelligence is certainly a necessary (though not sufficient) condition to be a reasonable mathematician. But an exceptional amount of intelligence has almost no bearing on whether one is an exceptional mathematician.

It's not entirely clear to me how somebody as mathematically talented as Tao could miss the basic Bayesian probabilistic argument that Scott Alexander gave, which shows that Tao's own existence is very strong evidence against his claim.

I think this is uncharitable to Tao. When he says "exceptional" here, I think he means it in the ordinary sense of the word -- the sense relevant to most of the readers he's addressing -- which would include not only himself but also almost all of his UCLA colleagues (for example).