I think there's no arrogance in saying the many were foolish to ignore the most used and probably critical part of intelligence. Especially when their work failed due to lacking it. If anything, those thinking they didnt need it were very arrogant in thinking their simple formalisms on old hardware would replace or outperform common sense on wetware.
Besides, time showed who were the fools. ;)
Who, in your view, would that be?
The people who thought that rule-driven inference engines were going to get us strong AI? OK, I can give you that events have proven that view to be foolish.
The people who thought that common sense was not the way to AI? Time has not shown that they are fools (at least, not yet), because no impressive AI advances (of which I am aware) are based on the common-sense approach. (I suppose CYC itself could be regarded as such an advance, but I see it more as building material than as a system in itself.)
Now, DonHopkins quotes Minsky as saying that a mix of approaches is the answer. Arguably, that is beginning to be proven. Common sense (the CYC approach)? Not so much.
Sure it has: deep learning. Human common sense is mostly based on intuition. Intuition is a process that finds patterns in unstructured data in terms of classification, relation to other things, and relationships in what we see vs how we respond. It has reinforcement mechanisms that improve the models with better exposure. Just like the neural networks.
They kind of indirectly worked on common sense. Not everything is there and data sets are too narrow for full, common sense. Yet, key attributes are there with amazing results from the likes of DeepMind. So, yeah, we proponents of common sense and intuition are winning. By 4 to 1 in a recent event.
" saying that a mix of approaches is the answer. Arguably, that is beginning to be proven. Common sense (the CYC approach)? Not so much."
Common sense is one component of a hybrid system. That's what I pushed. That's what I understood from others. CYC itself combines a knowledge base representing our "common sense" with one or more reasoning engines. The NN's leveraging it in their internal connections are often combined with tree searches, heuristics, and other things. Our own brain uses many specialized things working together to achieve an overall result.
So, no, common sense storage by itself won't do much for you. One needs the other parts. Hybrid systems were most like the only proven general intelligence. So, we should default on that.
Intuition just adds connections to other knowledge and reasoning part. That our brain is hybrid like that is why I advocate more hybrids, all with an intuition-like component.