I think the figures for highly engaged EAs working in Mental Health, drawn from EA Survey data, will be somewhat inflated by people who are working in mental health, but not in an EA-relevant sense e.g. as a psychologist. This is less of a concern for more distinctively EA cause areas of course.
Among people who, in EAS 2019, said they were currently working for an EA org, the normalised figures were only ~5% for Mental Health and ~2% for Climate Change (which, interestingly, is a bit closer to Ben’s overall estimates for the resources going to those areas). Also, as Ben noted, people could select multiple causes, and although the ‘normalisation’ accounts for this, it doesn’t change the fact that these figures might include respondents who aren’t solely working on Mental Health or Climate Change, but could be generalists whose work somewhat involved considering these areas.
I think the figures for highly engaged EAs working in Mental Health, drawn from EA Survey data, will be somewhat inflated by people who are working in mental health, but not in an EA-relevant sense e.g. as a psychologist. This is less of a concern for more distinctively EA cause areas of course.
Among people who, in EAS 2019, said they were currently working for an EA org, the normalised figures were only ~5% for Mental Health and ~2% for Climate Change (which, interestingly, is a bit closer to Ben’s overall estimates for the resources going to those areas). Also, as Ben noted, people could select multiple causes, and although the ‘normalisation’ accounts for this, it doesn’t change the fact that these figures might include respondents who aren’t solely working on Mental Health or Climate Change, but could be generalists whose work somewhat involved considering these areas.