Has Sam Harris stated his opinion on the orthogonality thesis anywhere?

I'm in love with someone I met at a LessWrong meetup, as well as another person whose first interaction with me was a Bayes theorem joke.

Based on your post, it is unclear to me whether you are in love with one person or two. Outside of LW, I would assume you were in love with one person, but here on LW, I assume polyamory is at play here.

Just musing on how LW has had a profound impact on my life. It was a strong influence in my deconversion from theism, it's helped me make significant medical decisions, and I'm in love with someone I met at a LessWrong meetup, as well as another person whose first interaction with me was a Bayes theorem joke.

Believing in Santa was not acceptable to my Christian fundamentalist parents. However, they also had the excuse of being immigrants, so they implied (and perhaps it's even true) that believing in Santa was not common in their culture: "The children in this country think that Santa is real. I don't know why their parents want them to believe in fairytales!" I was never told to hide the truth from other kids, and I don't recall if the subject ever came up in my interactions with other kids. We still had Christmas gifts, a tree, sang Christmas songs, and even took pictures sitting on Santa's lap at the mall. I just understood that it was all for the sake of participating in fun customs.

I think the main result of this was to teach me to feel comfortable with being different. But there were lots of other things in my upbringing as well that had this same effect.

I probably would not join, but I would try to research it to figure out why people who join usually like it. Depending on what I learned, I could change my mind.

What I would prefer is to have the option of sending/receiving thoughts/emotions/memories when and with whom I choose, with consent of those involved. Other mental abilities would of course have to be implemented as well, to allow this kind of telepathy to be manageable.

Awhile back I posted a comment on the open thread about the feasibility of permanent weight-loss. (Basically: is it a realistic goal?) I didn't get a response, so I'm linking it here to try again. Please respond here instead of there. Note: most likely some of my links to studies in that comment are no longer valid, but at least the citations are there if you want to look those up.

Some fraction of the population is naturally poly, some naturally mono, some can go either way depending on circumstances.

What's the source of this claim? I hadn't heard that until today.

I'm not certain I understand. Are you saying that fewer species will go extinct if people eat meat? Or are you agreeing that being veg is the best way to preserve biodiversity, but that you don't care about biodiversity?

You're right it might have been good to answer these in the core essay.

Present Triviality. Becoming a vegetarian is at least a minor inconvenience...

I disagree that being a vegetarian is an inconvenience. I haven't found my social activities restricted in any non-trivial way and being healthy has been just as easy/hard as when eating meat. It does not drain my attention from other EA activities.

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Future Triviality. [...] we should invest everything we have into making it as likely as possible that humans and non-humans will thrive in the distant future

I agree with this in principle, but again don't think vegetarianism is a stop from that. Certainly removing factory farming is a small win compared to successful star colonization, but I don't think there's much we can do now to ensure successful colonization, while there is stuff we can do now to ensure factory farming elimination.

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Experiential Suffering Needn't Correlate With Damage-Avoiding or Damage-Signaling Behavior.

It need not, which is what makes consciousness thorny. I don't think there is a tidy resolution to this problem. We'll have to take our best guess, and that involves thinking nonhuman animals suffer. We'd probably even want to err on the safe side, which would increase our consideration toward nonhuman animals. It would also be consistent with an Ocham's razor approach.

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Something About Sapience Is What Makes Suffering Bad.

This doesn't feature among my ethical framework, at least. I don't know how this intuitively works for other people. I also don't think there's much I can say about it.

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Aren't You Just Anthropomorphizing Non-Humans? [...] But this isn't evidence that the thing empathized with is actually conscious.

It's not. But there's other considerations and lines of evidence, so my worry that we're just anthropomorphizing is present, but rather low.