[Buldak]

Yeah, the author says that for any of these problems "there should only be one reasonable rule." But I suspect that "reasonable" here really points to contingent facts about human psychology, i.e. some rules just strike us as more intuitive or appealing than others, but they aren't correct in any objective sense. That sort of gives the lie to the notion that what we're exercising here is "meta-rationality."

[nerdponx]

The problem with these puzzles is that, without rules for the system, you can just make up your own rules and then solve the puzzle within the context of those rules.

For example, in the second puzzle, the arrangement of black-and-white shapes is the same on the left and right pages, but the right page is rotated relative to the left page. Is the question about the shapes as in an ordered collection? Or is the question about the pages in their entirety? These problems tend to be underspecified, and end up being more of a guessing exercise about the authors intentions than anything else.

[rrmm]

Yeah I think a lot of it is learning to think like how the people who thought up the problem think.

It still may not be a bad exercise (like art students at a gallery copying a master's work), but you shouldn't get too far ahead of yourself claiming it's some sort of 'exercise in pure reason'.

[rrmm]

These sorts of tasks are teaching you how to think a specific way which our society promotes. Mechanistic, natural, causal, rational (in the first-order logic sense) with a healthy dose of Ockham's razor and simplicity as an aesthetic.

I stress though, I'm a big fan of these things and the innovations they have enabled, but you still have to understand that they are an axiomatic underpinning. It's like Euclid's parallel postulate in a way: There is non-euclidean geometry out there.