Really good question!

Yes indeed that's what I am suggesting: if a strong bottleneck is mentoring for an org, one approach of "more broadly distributing ressources" might be that programmes increase their student-staff ratio (meaning a bit more self-guided work for each participant but more participants in total)

Prominent and very competitive programmes I was thinking of are SERI MATS and MLAB from redwood, but I think that extreme applicants-participant ratios are true for pretty much all paid and even many non-paid EA fellowships, e.g. PIBBSS or . Thanks for the hint that it may be helpful to mention some of them.

@'they have more ressources than us': Why does that matter? If the question is "How can we achieve the most possible impact with the limited ressources we got?". Then given the extreme competitiveness of these programmes and the early-career-stage most applicants are in, a plausible hypothesis is that scaling up the quantity of these training programmes at the expense of quality is a way to increase total output. And so far it seems to me that this is potentially neglected

Thanks for the elaborate answer. I'd be curious to hear a bit more of your thoughts regarding the meta-comment in your last paragraph + hints what to change about the information environment you suspect here, if you have time

note: feel free to be as unrigorous as you want with the response, you don't need to justify beliefs, just flesh them out a bit, I don't intend to contest them but want to use them to improve my understanding of that situation 

I think your example with fetuses being the variation between single cells and adults is very adequate here. So my claim would probably be something along the lines of "the fact that 8-month old fetuses exist (which usually may not be killed anymore) is a strong reason why in most countries 4-months-old fetuses have a lot of legal & societal protection. If there was nothing in between the 4 months fetus and the born baby, I don't think many countries would ban abortion of 4-months old fetuses, rather it is there because of the transition. Thus the existence of a smooth transition between non-human animals and sapiens would increase support for "lower" animals.

I agree that there is already a continuum with e.g. disabled sapiens as you name it. However I don't think that "commonsense" is aware of that. I think commonsense sees  mentally disabled people as something "that could have been any of us" (or could even still happen to many of us, as some mental disabilities are not from birth). However intermediate species can not be considered disabled exceptions/"misfortunes" or something like that

Does the CEO have to be based in the UK or is willingness to travel a lot sufficient?