Is this what you were referring to in "Is Scott Alexander bad at math?" when you said that being good at math is largely about "aesthetic discernment" rather than "intelligence"? Because if so that seems like an unusual notion of "intelligence", to use it to mean explicit reasoning only and exclude pattern recognition. Like it would seem very odd to say "MIT Mystery Hunt doesn't require much intelligence," even if frequently domain knowledge is more important to spotting its patterns.

Or did you mean something else? I realize this is not the same post, but I'm just not clear on how you're separating "aesthetic discernment" from "intelligence" here; the sort of aesthetic discernment needed for mathematics seems like a kind of intelligence.