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Humans are not automatically strategic
gnovos100

but he did have a preoccupation with her hair...

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Humans are not automatically strategic
gnovos00

Yes this is definitively correct. Also, it's a world with magic rings and dragons people.

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1NancyLebovitz
There are different kinds of plausibility. There's plausibility for fiction, and there's plausibility for culture. Both pull in the same direction for LOTR to have Absolute Beauty, which by some odd coincidence, is a good match for what most of its readers think is beautiful. What might break your suspension of disbelief? The usual BEM behavior would probably mean that the Watcher at the Gate preferencially grabbing Galadriel if she were available would seem entirely reasonable, but what about Treebeard? Shelob?
Humans are not automatically strategic
gnovos160

There's a reason why we don't think strategically, and it's actually a very good reason and is unfortunately why we will never have an innately strategic mentality: cost. Specifically, the cost of time. i.e. it's always cheaper in terms of time to make a correct lucky guess on the first try than to work out a solution properly over a significant length of time.

Imagine there was a such thing as a lucky charm, and by holding it, you were, say, 70% more likely to always get the right answer on your calculus test without even needing to completely understa... (read more)

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3orthonormal
These unconscious strategies optimized or satisficed in the ancestral environment, when people weren't conscious of enough relevant factors to make long chains of reasoning (or quantitative thinking) obviously superior to their unconscious heuristics and biases. They're clearly far from optimal (and sometimes far from satisfactory) in the modern developed world. Some things have changed way too fast for evolution to keep up.
0byrnema
I completely agree; we think with our 'gut' as much as with our 'brain'. Only, I wouldn't denigrate "pattern matching". It's much more than a lucky charm; it's a powerful and high-level component of intelligence. It's something that we haven't systematized yet, and so we don’t understand it or always trust it very well. All my comments today will be defending human intelligence.. I wonder about the motive behind this goal, since I agree people could easily be more intelligent, and that would be great. Also -- in comparison to what? It's not like my saying 'humans are so intelligent they're at least 8.3!' means anything different than, 'humans are so dumb they're no more than 8.6!'.