Asking the question "to whom am I thankful", more than feeling thankfulness, is the superstitious behavior here. If we allow thankfulness to have no object, the conflict is resolved.

You may be thankful to the other driver. You may be thankful to yourself or the relevant parts of your body that helped avoid a worse outcome. You may be thankful to your past self, or your alternative universe self. You may be thanking the laws of physics. Maybe we can just drop the to preposition and be done with that.

As to why you are feeling thankful, I find Antisuji and DaFranker explanations plausible.

As to what should be done about it, I can't identify negative consequences to being thankful. Do you suspect it trains you to for risk or clumsiness?

when you can score points by taking offense, there is a natural death spiral of taking more and more and more offense.

Yes. Either that, or it empowers martinets to come up with petty etiquette norms and declare that someone's approach is "rude" or "trollish", regardless of their actual merits. This is especially ironic when the debate itself involves important issues in ethics, empathy or similar: the person with the most ethical or empathetic position in the debate can nonetheless end up being silenced.

This may fit better in an Open Thread, since you're not even asking for a specific kind of book.

Edit: since I'm posting here, might as well recommend Confessions of a Conjuror by Derren Brown, narrated by the author. excerpt

To add a bit more information, this book covers a number of studies on the placebo effect (since the citations are in the book, which I do not have access to now, I don't know where to find the original studies.) These studies indicate that the strength of the placebo effect also varies according to the color of the medicine, with different colored pills acting as more effective placebos for different ailments, and that the placebo effect can outweigh the actual effects of a drug (so that a small dose of vomit-inducing medicine could cause less vomiting than the control group, which received no medicine, if offered as an anti-nausea medicine.)

Absence of sex is evidence of the Least Convenient Possible World.

The thing knows its audience.

What about the patch evaporation problem, though?

Seems fine now.

*adding keywords to suck in ctrl+f karma: fixed,working,back,patch,works,repaired,restored,okay

Your grounds for skepticism match the heuristic that Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom propose in The wisdom of nature quite closely. They propose this heuristic to evaluate interventions to enhance humans, but it's clear that it has much broader applicability. Here's the relevant excerpt:

Suppose that we liken evolution to a surpassingly great engineer. (The limitations of this metaphor are part of what makes it useful for our purposes.) Using this metaphor, the EOC can be expressed as the question, ‘‘How could we realistically hope to improve on evolution’s work?’’ We propose that there are three main categories of possible answers, which can be summarized as follows:

• Changed tradeoffs. Evolution ‘‘designed’’ the system for operation in one type of environment, but now we wish to deploy it in a very different type of environment. It is not surprising, then, that we might be able to modify the system better to meet the demands imposed on it by the new environment. Making such modifications need not require engineering skills on a par with those of evolution: consider that it is much harder to design and build a car from scratch than it is to fit an existing car with a new set of wheels or make some other tweaks to improve functioning in some particular setting, such as icy roads. Similarly, the human organism, whilst initially ‘‘designed’’ for operation as a hunter-gatherer on the African savannah, must now function in the modern world. We may well be capable of making some enhancing tweaks and adjustments to the new environment even though our engineering talent does not remotely approach that of evolution.

• Value discordance There is a discrepancy between the standards by which evolution measured the quality of her work, and the standards that we wish to apply. Even if evolution had managed to build the finest reproduction-and-survival machine imaginable, we may still have reason to change it because what we value is not primarily to be maximally effective inclusive-fitness optimizers. This discordance in objectives is an important source of answers to the EOC. It is not surprising that we can modify a system better to meet our goals, if these goals differ substantially from the ones that (metaphorically might be seen as having) guided evolution in designing the system the way she did. Again, this explanation does not presuppose that our engineering talent exceeds evolution’s. Compare the case to that of a mediocre technician, who would never be able to design a car, let alone a good one; but who may well be capable of converting the latest BMW model into a crude rain-collecting device, thereby enhancing the system’s functionality as a water collecting device.

• Evolutionary restrictions. We have access to various tools, materials, and techniques that were unavailable to evolution. Even if our engineering talent is far inferior to evolution’s, we may nevertheless be able to achieve certain things that stumped evolution, thanks to these novel aids. We should be cautious in invoking this explanation, for evolution often managed to achieve with primitive means what we are unable to do with state-of-the-art technology. But in some cases one can show that it is practically impossible to create a certain feature without some particular tool—no matter how ingenious the engineer—while the same feature can be achieved by any dimwit given access to the right tool. In these special cases we might be able to overcome evolutionary restrictions.

How is religiosity of the author relevant?

Ugly as HELL [1]. I have not actually read any of the text, I will simply list elements I dislike, in the order I saw them. My opinion matters little, I suggest you get some critique from Hacker News [2].

• logo does not stand out

• grey buttons have a weird volume, I think the white border causes this

• RSS logo stands out more than SI logo, I have not seen RSS logos used to denote a blog in years

• text in search box has a weird white glow, glass effect is ugly, magnifying glass icon is aliased, it changing to orange on hover makes it look like you just learned about complementary colors.

• text in slideshow is aliased (Win7, Chrome latest)

• grey android thing in second slideshow panel is creepy

• big light blue clipart-thingies look childish

• font on http://singularity.org/what-we-do/ is weird, the letter c looks like e

• meaningless math symbols in the background make me cringe

My impressions the moment I saw the main page: old, cheap, childish, scammy. I would prefer clean, if not minimalist.

[1] http://helldesign.net/ everything they do is ugly, their own website included

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/ they won't like it