Report on money moved S2 2015

This is the semiannual report detailing all money moved by REG. As always, it’s intended to create transparency about where REG donations are allocated. In the second half of 2015, REG supporters donated a total of $382,755 to highly effective charities!

What happened in S2 2015

Here are some highlights of  what’s happened from July to December 2015 and since our last update:

  • We had 65 new sign-ups, bringing us to a total of over 215 REG members!
  • We are proud to welcome Jason “jcarver” Somerville as a new REG ambassador. Jason has done a huge amount to popularize poker streaming and is widely considered to be one of poker’s best ambassadors – he’s now also promoting a rational and scientific approach to charitable giving! Jason is promoting REG on his twitch.tv channel, and is donating a percentage of his ad revenue and poker winnings himself!
  • We successfully launched our first official tournament series at King’s casino.
  • Several Poker and DFS pros hosted charity drives and matching donations, together raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, and encouraging many more long-term pledges.
  • Most recently, Antonio Esfandiari was involved in a prop bet for $50,000 which required him to lunge everywhere for 48 hours; upon winning the bet, he decided to donate all of the winnings to charity REG and One Drop.
  • One of our co-founders, Liv Boeree presented at the EA Global conference at Google HQ in San Francisco. 
  • And finally, we are also beginning to explore very promising opportunities for effective altruism within more untapped industries such as trading and finance. Watch this space for more news soon!

Allocation of unrestricted donations

In total, we received $44,364 in unrestricted donations in the second half of 2015. The REG board allocated them as follows:

  • $10,370 went to Animal Ethics (AE).
  • $5,584 went to the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR).
  • $14,205 went to the Great Ape Project (GAP).
  • $14,205 went to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI).

Animal Ethics (AE) provides information and resources on the most relevant issues in animal ethics. Its approach is more academical than traditional animal charities, which enables the targeting of opinion leaders in science and academia. AE is unique in that it also prioritises the reduction of wild animal suffering, a focus area that has so far been highly neglected.

Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) is an organisation in the San Francisco Bay Area that is working to increase the rationality of effective altruists and also of society overall. CFAR staff members teach workshops on rationality and self-improvement, create online material and offer programs for gifted high school students. They perform research and evaluate their teaching methods in order to find proven ways to overcome cognitive biases. By encouraging people to think more about what is important to them, CFAR raises awareness of global problems and priorities and paves the way for finding lasting solutions.

The Great Ape Project (GAP) is an international organisation of primatologists, anthropologists, ethicists, and others who advocate a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes that would confer basic legal rights on non-human great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) does foundational mathematical research to ensure smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact. As more and more human cognitive feats come to be reproduced by artificially intelligent systems, we can expect to encounter a number of unprecedented risks and benefits. These and other under-explored questions will only become more pressing as progress in computer science allows AI systems to act with increasing autonomy and efficiency.

Distribution of all donations

Including both donor-chosen and unrestricted allocation of donations, the total of $382,755 raised in the second half of 2015 was distributed like this:

REG donations for the second half of 2015
Charity Sum (~USD)
Against Malaria Foundation 80,207
Animal Charity Evaluators 806
Animal Ethics 25,506
Center for Applied Rationality 5,639
Deworm the World Initiative 16,964
Effective Altruism Foundation 26,140
GiveDirectly 504
Mercy For Animals 143
Machine Intelligence Research Institute 188,192
Raising for Effective Giving 25,009
The Great Ape Project 13,645
Total 382,755