Thanks for this post! To add one thought that keeps bugging me: I believe joining an EA org on average lowers career capital by a medium to large extent in comparison to alternative plausible careers.
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many jobs are less specifically relevant for the continuous development of industry-job market cash-cow skills (or whatever one wants to call that).
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joining an EA-org feels rather awkward to explain to the majority of employers with a feeling that most are not particularly moved towards “PRO-employ” by the explanation one will give.
If true, this has some severe implications which IMO are not discussed prominently enough (both in the struggle for attracting talent and in the discussion on leadership’s abilities which this post adresses, see e.g. lock-in effects and biases).
In my personal career decisions, this suspicion has had a large multiplier effect on the uncertainties I am struggling with (say, the good-ness of E2G (I believe the community under-estimates), EA (..), how much to invest into career capital vs. when to start cashing in).
Thanks for your post! As mentioned in other comments, one central factor to understand how cost-effective your procedure appears, could be the cost of having a medical professional as you are (or a person with the minimum required medical expertise and local context knowledge) spend their time roaming, (incentivizing people to meet them, this one was easy for you and probably always is), meeting people and identifying patients to support. Could you roughly estimate these costs per case if you were to do that as your main occupation?
The second part of it, paying for their treatment, seems like something that could be rather easy (much uncertainty here ofc) to do when embedded into the right framing. As pointed out by Jason and others in the comments, these are patients with very tangible, heart-warming stories and very obvious direct impact-connection to a donation, which makes them suitable for successful fundraising within the broader non-EA target-groups.
This is of course without evaluating the potentially quickly arising adverse effects such as the deterioration of informal institutions of local fundraising among families and friends due to them pointing potential patients to you etc..