Disclaimer: I'm still fairly new here, and though I did use the search bar it's entirely possible this has been discussed before. Just point me in the right direction if this is so.
While reading about 4chan's Japanese progenitor website, it occurred to me that I know nothing about the state of rationality in the non-English-speaking world, and more specifically the non-English-speaking internet. Is there a Russian version of SIAI? A Japanese Less Wrong? What about Korean Robin Hansons and Eliezer Yudkowskys?
If we take Religion as any indication of irrationality then America should be one of the least rational countries in the world. So if there are like-minded individuals out there speaking in languages we don't know, are we doing anything to collaborate with them? Do they have their own sequences and their own HPMORs which we could be reading?
And if there are no Singularitarian, Cryonics-Supporting, Utilitarianism-Advocating websites for the majority of the human race, isn't that a huge deal? Aren't Europeans and Asians more likely to be open to rationality, if only because of their atheism? If we want Friendly-AI to be developed, should we be translating the sequences into Chinese and Hindu as quickly as possible?
Ok. This isn't true for everyone and isn't true for quite a few people. For example, Eliezer, myself and Dr. Manhattan are all former Orthodox Jews who (at least by our descriptions and best knowledge) left in part due to actual evidence issues. So people really do care about evidence. Moreover, most humans are pretty complicated so even if someone has some amount of belief-in-belief they often also care about evidence issues.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hard atheism" in this context and wonder if differences in meaning are relevant here. Most atheists aren't going to claim that there's a 100% chance that there is no deity (even Richard Dawkins won't do that). So if that's what you mean then there's no disagreement. Do you mean that or do you mean something else?
And if Jack Chick turns out to be correct, not only will all that effort put into existential risk be a complete waste, but you will have wasted a tremendous amount of resources that could have gone to prevent eternal torture. And this applies to less sadistic or less interventionary deities also. If you are worried about existential risk, then one is already operating on a framework that assigns a low probability to most notions of "God".
It may help to reread what Laplace is saying. Laplace isn't saying that he's not thinking about the hypothesis, he's saying he doesn't need it. The God-of-the-gaps created by Newton to explain planets not falling drastically out of orbit is something Laplace doesn't need. That's not at all the same thing as saying one isn't thinking about the issue.