I'm not saying it's 99.9% of human intelligence, I'm saying you're describing 99.9% of human thought.
This is what humans do, we hear about something thing and then we learn how to apply it to another. You even mention here "stacking balls" and then making the connection that eggs are also round and would need to be stacked in the same way to prevent rolling. This is reasoning, using what you've learned and applying it to a novel problem.
What you are describing as novel problems are really just doing the same thing at a completely different level. Like I play soccer, but no matter how much I trained, there is no way I would ever reach Messi's skill, because he was just born with special skill in that area, but still just human like the rest of us.
And remember I'm mostly just pointing to the "text predictor" claim. I'm not convinced it's not, and I think that appeared true for early models, but not so easy to apply to current models.
Yeah, it is hard to say if the "glorified text predictor" is completely accurate, since the sheer size of the model allows for some pretty deep connections.
And, thinking about it since making that post, it's hard to say for sure that even Einstein or Newton were doing anything differently or were just the first/most famous to put those particular things together.
Yeah for me it's less that I rage about getting downvoted, its just when I see a massive number of downvotes for posts that are simply pointing to the facts, or being logical and rational...and they get a massive number of downvotes because it contradicts the circlejerk or what people want to be true.
Yeah, though on the bright side, it's not nearly as bad here as Reddit was. Based on votes and replies, it seemed like a non-trivial amount of people on there didn't have much skill in the reading comprehension or persuasion department.