I don’t know about intuition, but one definitely needs certain innate abilities, otherwise you hit the exponential wall long before you learn sufficiently advanced math. (I wrote about it in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kcKZoSvyK5tks8nxA/learning-is-asymptotically-computationally-inefficient.) This is probably not about some simple objective metrics like the amount of working memory, but about hard to define ability to think abstractly about certain topics.
I don’t know about intuition, but one definitely needs certain innate abilities, otherwise you hit the exponential wall long before you learn sufficiently advanced math. (I wrote about it in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kcKZoSvyK5tks8nxA/learning-is-asymptotically-computationally-inefficient.) This is probably not about some simple objective metrics like the amount of working memory, but about hard to define ability to think abstractly about certain topics.