Can you solve this pier puzzle?

Everyone that knows calculus and immediately though to use it to solve this problem are experiencing a strange phenomenon where having more tools actually makes you less likely to pick the correct one. If you have a flat head screw, and you have 1 flat head screwdriver and 1 phillips head screwdriver, you'll probably just pick up the flat head and try it. But if you had 30 different flat heads, you might not know which one to use right away. You might be tempted to use a screwdriver which will definitely work for all screws, but you might end up doing extra work because of it. The same thing happens with math. Once we know that we can always use calculus to solve these optimization problems, we jump to this one-size-fits-all tool to solve this problem, and end up doing a lot of work to get to the correct answer. If you never learned calculus, you're more likely to think of the simpler solution. I would say aside from the fact that there's less info to sort through, it's also got to do with our desire to find a better solution being much less than our desire to find any solution. Once we find a solution, inefficient though it may be, we stop trying. Not having that go-to optimization approach means that we think a little harder about how to solve it and likely stumble upon the simpler answer.