If the organizations you would support have decreasing marginal returns even at the scale of your personal donations without the lottery, that also seems like a good reason to avoid the lottery, although not necessarily decisive.
If you think you would not beat a particular CEA fund in expectation—which you should expect if you’re fairly value-aligned and have similar priors with one of them and don’t otherwise have major consequential disagreements, since they work on evaluating grant opportunities full-time--, I think it would be better to donate to them, at least on the direct benefits to charities, since they do make grants to orgs with I think pretty quickly decreasing marginal returns (or at least the animal welfare one does, in my view).
If the organizations you would support have decreasing marginal returns even at the scale of your personal donations without the lottery, that also seems like a good reason to avoid the lottery, although not necessarily decisive.
If you think you would not beat a particular CEA fund in expectation—which you should expect if you’re fairly value-aligned and have similar priors with one of them and don’t otherwise have major consequential disagreements, since they work on evaluating grant opportunities full-time--, I think it would be better to donate to them, at least on the direct benefits to charities, since they do make grants to orgs with I think pretty quickly decreasing marginal returns (or at least the animal welfare one does, in my view).