EA Software Engineers Awesome List

Doing Good Better for Technologists

An unofficial list of personal and open source projects that are relevant to EA Effective Altruism (or are at least deemed EA-adjacent by the contributors).

Table of Contents

• EA Software Engineers Awesome List
  • Table of Contents
  • Personal Projects
  • Open Source Projects
    • AI Safety
    • Animal Welfare
    • Climate
    • Data Analysis
    • Effective Giving
    • Forecasting
    • Multiple Cause Areas
    • Policy
  • Other Awesome Lists
  • Contribute
  • Credits
  • License

Personal Projects

Created by EA Software Engineers

• elsim – software for simulating elections and evaluating the utilitarian performance of different voting systems, as well as example scripts that reproduce results from computational social choice theory papers
• Ideact.it – a tool to evaluate different cause areas and ideas by assigning significance values to different variables. The tool tries to combine the importance, tractability, neglectedness (ITN) framework with personal factors and give a clear visualisation of this. POC: Zak Watts.
• Your Project Name – a short description about your project

Open Source Projects

Recommended by EA Software Engineers

AI Safety

• aisafetyideas.com - https://aisafetyideas.com/
• AI Safety Info / Stampy - "a single-point-of-access to AI Safety, designed to route people to the information they need whatever stage of exploration they are at"
  • You can interact with the wiki here
  • Stampy is a chatbot written in Python which can serve as a conversational interface between a human and AI Safety Info (and more!). Currently, Stampy runs only on Rob Miles' Discord server but he's probably going to invade other online spaces too.
• DecisionTransformerInterpretability – mechanistic interpretability of Reinforcement Learning project. Read more. POC: Joseph Bloom.
• Ought - https://ice.ought.org/
• Transformer Lens – library for doing mechanistic interpretability of GPT-2 Style language models. The goal of mechanistic interpretability is to take a trained model and reverse engineer the algorithms the model learned during training from its weights. POC: Joseph Bloom.
• Tuned Lens - tools for understanding how transformer predictions are built layer-by-layer

Animal Welfare

• Vegan Hacktivists - https://veganhacktivists.org/

Climate

• Code against Climate Change - curated list of tech projects that aim to inspire disruptive technological climate action!

Data Analysis

• Eigen Trust - A distributed reputation system
• Forecast - forecast package for R
• Guesstimate - Create Fermi Estimates and Perform Monte Carlo Estimates - https://getguesstimate.com/
• Our World in Data - https://ourworldindata.org/
• Polis - https://pol.is/home
• Squiggle - https://www.squiggle-language.com/

Effective Giving

• Card Generator - a free, easy to use eCard creator specifically for people giving to effective charities as gifts
• Impact Market - https://app.impactmarket.com/
• Raise - open-source fundraising and giving platform

Forecasting

• Meta Forecast - https://metaforecast.org/

Multiple Cause Areas

• Advice for getting started in Open Source
• eawork.club - https://www.eawork.club/ - About High-impact jobs and side projects for effective altruists
• ForumMagnum - The development repository for LessWrong2 and the EA Forum
• The Nonlinear Library - automatically turns posts from the EA Forum, Alignment Forum, and LessWrong into a podcast you can listen to. Read more.
• The Unjournal: organizes and funds public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects. We focus on quantitative work that informs global priorities, especially in economics, policy, and social science. We need software engineers to help us build our platforms (e.g., our space on pubub, our editorial management workflows (leveraging API tools), and integrate with other communications, meta-science, open-science, bibliometric, and prediction/estimation platforms and tools (e.g., potentially Plaudit, EA Forum, OSF.io, Squiggle, Metaculus, etc.). We're hiring contractors, and will have more contract work (and volunteer work) soon. (Tags: Research, modeling/prediction, and research impact)

Policy

• PolicyEngine -open-source software to compute the impact of public policy

Contribute

Contributions are welcome!

Find out how to contribute and read the contribution guidelines here.

Credits

This project was initially created with Cookiecutter and the custom cookiecutter-awesome :cookie:

License

To the extent possible under law, Nicole Janeway has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. See LICENSE.