As Carl Linderholm pointed out, pattern-matching questions more properly belong to the field of parapsychology--he restricted his discussion to guessing the next number in a sequence, but the result can be readily generalized.

Satire aside, it seems to me that these Raven matrices get a lot easier to figure out once you've seen a few. At first glance I couldn't make heads or tails of the one you provided, but I went and took an online Raven matrix test and afterward that one seemed straightforward enough (in the sense that I quickly found a rule that was consistent with the rest of the matrix and produced one of the possible options). Presumably the easier ones familiarized me with the sorts of patterns the examiners were wont to use and reuse.

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. But two hypotheses come to mind.

This reminds me of the Grothendieck quote from the previous article: "Yet it is not these gifts, nor the most determined ambition combined with irresistible will-power, that enables one to surmount the "invisible yet formidable boundaries " that encircle our universe." Both Grothendieck and Tao appear to discount pure intellect in favor of something less tangible when it comes to doing truly great mathematics. It's possible that they happened to encounter some exceptionally intelligent mathematicians who never managed to produce exceptional mathematics. On the other hand, it would be worth asking how many (if any) great mathematicians had high but non-exceptional intelligence.