"I think if you have enough control over your diet to be a vegan, you have enough control to do one of the other diets that has the weight effects without health side effects. "

Fair point, I was thinking of vegans as a random sample in terms of their capacity for deliberate weight-loss dieting, when of course they very much are not. 

"In fact, weight loss is a common side effect of a vegan diet, which could explain all or most of any health upsides, rather than being vegan itself."

This is more a point against your thesis than for it, I think. It doesn't matter if the ideal meat diet is better than the ideal vegan diet, because people won't ever actually eat either-this is just the point about how people won't actually eat 2 cups of sesame seeds a day or whatever. If going vegan in practice typically causes people to lose weight, and this is usually a benefit, that's a point in favour of veganism. Unless people can easily just lose weight another way-and they very much cannot as we know from how much almost everyone overweight struggles to get permanently healthy by dieting-it doesn't matter if the benefit from veganism could theoretically be gained by some non-vegan diet that you could theoretically follow. I guess the main counter-argument here would be if you think the existence of ozempic now makes losing weight in another way sufficiently easy. 

There is plausibly some advantage from delay yes. For one thing even if you don't have any preference for which side wins the race, making the gap larger plausibly means the leading country can be more cautious because their lead is bigger, and right now the US is in the lead. For another thing, if you absolutely forced me to choose, I'd say I'd rather the US won the race than China did (undecided whether the US winning is better/worse than a multipolar world with 2 winners). It's true that the US has a much worse record in terms of invading other places and otherthrowing the governments than China, but China has not had anything like the US's international clout until recently, so it's unclear how predictive past behaviour on China's part is of future behaviour. And on the other hand, China is, while apparently well-governed in many ways, very authoritarian, which I think is bad. (Although the US may be about to go less than fully democratic, it would have to fall far to be as authoritarian as China, though it does imprison a much higher % of its population than China I think.) I generally would not want to see authoritarianism win out in some general sense, even if China itself might be a more restrained actor than the US in many ways. 

Yeah, maybe I am using the word Nat Sec wrong, but my sense is that US intelligence agencies were involved in at least some of the history I was mentioning. I am very much not an expert on that history, but I recall Matt Yglesias recommending this (which I haven't read to be clear): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method  I don't think Yglesias is particularly at all expert of particularly reliable on this stuff either, but I do think he generally has a fairly (civic) nationalistic pro-US point of view, so if the book persuaded even him that the US did a lot of bad stuff in Indonesia and elsewhere during The Cold War, it probably marshals quite a lot of evidence for that conclusion, and probably isn't too partisanly tankie. 

I don't remember the size, but I was thinking Dustin still has Facebook shares also, and probably still wants Facebook to do well on some level. EDIT: Although it's possible he has sold his Facebook shares since the last time I remember them being explicitly mentioned somewhere. 

Yeah, I don't think all Nat Sec stuff is bad. Competition and rivalry here is inevitable to some degree, and we really do need Nat Sec people to help manage the US end of it, especially as they are also the people who know most about making treaties and deals between rivals. 

We also want to avoid a conventional war between the US and China (plausibly over Taiwan and TSMC). Although I guess there is an argument that X-risk considerations should dominate that, but I think I go with commonsense over longtermist philosophical argument on that one, and probably such a war is very bad for X-risk anyway. We also want better US-China relations during the AI race. Both of these goals are somewhat threatened by the US trying to aggressively contain China. EDIT: I should say, they are threatened by the US trying to aggressively contain China's AI development in the short term. Obviously, taking up a more aggressive posture on defending Taiwan itself might deter China rather than starting a war (maybe). And of course, once transformative AI is here, China being significantly ahead in the race makes China occupying Taiwan more likely, though whether it raises the risk of a great power US-China war which is what we really should care most about is much less clear. 

More over there is also just a long record of the US doing really, really bad shit for nat sec reasons that makes me feel nervous about aligning with nat sec people even though I think it is probably sometimes necessary and I'm not saying no one should ever fund a nat sec orientated thing: like when they gave out death lists of communists to the Indonesian government and then 5.-1 million people were murdered (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366), or the other time they backed a genocide in Indonesia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Timor_genocide), or the time they backed a genocide in Guatemala where "national security" mostly meant the interests of US fruit companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide or their complicity in genocide in Bangladesh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide#Operation_Searchlight). Things have gotten a bit better since the Cold War, but look what is happening in Gaza right now. 

Yeah, obviously Moskovitz is not motivated by personal greed or anything like that since he is giving most of his money away, and I doubt Karnofsky is primarily motivated by money in that sense either. And I think both of them have done great things, or I wouldn't be on this forum! But having your business do well is a point of pride for business people, it means more money *for your political and charitable goals*, and people also generally want their spouses' business to succeed for reasons beyond "I want money for myself to buy nice stuff". (For people who don't know Karnofsky is married to Anthropic's President, which also means the CEO is his brother-in-law.) 

"Center for AI Safety Action Fund (CAIS AF): CAIS AF is well placed to focus on the national security angle of AIS, with a current focus on chip security, supporting multiple promising efforts towards e.g. location verification and increased BIS capacity."

I am a bit worried that "the national security angle of AIS" is sort of code for "screwing over China to advance US hegemony with possible mild AI safety side effects", and I worry that Open Phil. has maybe been funding a bit too much of that sort of stuff lately, even if they haven't funded CAIS AF. (Though it is difficult to figure out exactly what particular Open Phil grants to particular nat sec focused orgs are actually funding them to do, and if you forced me to press a button I would choose the US winning the AI race over China winning it.) 

Far-future effects are the most important determinant of what we ought to do

Weakly agree (at least if we caveat that I believe in some sort of deontic constraints on utility maximizing.) I think it is unclear that we can influence the far future in a predictable way, but slightly more likely than not, and I think the expected number of people and other sentient beings in the far future is likely very, very large as Greaves and McAskill argue. 

"This disagreement leads to my disagreement with their recommendations—relatively incremental interventions seem much more promising to me."

What's the reasoning here? 

I should say that I don't actually think Open Phil's leadership are anything other than sincere in their beliefs and goals. The sort of bias I am talking about operates more subtly than that. (See also the claim often attributed to Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent that the US media functions as pro-US, pro-business propaganda, but not because journalists are just responding to incentives in a narrow way, but because newspaper owners hire people who sincerely share their world view, which is common at elite universities (etc.) anyway.)