Do those goals sound like world-improving ones?

Let us consider them, one by one.

I want to figure out ways to improve cooperation between people and groups.

This means that the goals of the people and groups will be more effectively realised. It is world-improving if and only if the goals towards which the group works are world-improving.

A group can be expected, on the whole, to work towards goals which appear to be of benefit to the group. The best way to ensure that the goals are world-improving, then, might be to (a) ensure that the "group" in question consists of all intelligent life (and not merely, say, Brazilians) and (b) the groups' goals are carefully considered and inspected for flaws by a significant number of people.

(b) is probably best accomplished be encouraging voluntary cooperation, as opposed to unquestioning obedience of orders. (a) simply requires ensuring that it is well-known that bigger groups are more likely to be successful, and punishing the unfair exploitation of outside groups.

On the whole, I think this is most likely a world-improving goal.

I want to do research on cultural attitudes towards altruism and ways to get more people to be altruistic/charitable

Alturism certainly sounds like a world-improving goal. Historically, there have been a few missteps in this field - mainly when one person proposes a way to get people to be more altruistic, but then someone else implements it and does so in a way that ensures that he reaps the benefit of everyone else's largesse.

So, likely to be world-improving, but keep an eye on the people trying to implement your research. (Be careful if you implement it yourself - have someone else keep a close eye on you in that circumstance).

I want to try and get LW-style critical thinking classes introduced in schools from an early age so as to raise the sanity waterline

Critical thinking is good. However, again, take care in the implementation; simply teaching students what to write in the exam is likely to do much less good than actually teaching critical thinking. Probably the most important thing to teach students is to ask questions and to think about the answers - and the traditional exam format makes it far too easy to simply teach students to try to guess the teacher's password.

If implemented properly, likely to be world-improving.

...that's my thoughts on those goals. Other people will likely have different thoughts.

My intuitions say that specialism increases output, so we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say.

To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in. Unfortunately, everyone else seems to strongly disagree.

I think there's an implicit premise or two that you may have mentally included but failed to express, running along the lines of:

The all-controlling state is run by completely benevolent beings who are devoted to their duty and never make errors.

Sans such a premise, one lazy bureaucrat cribbing his cubicle neighbor's allocations, or a sloppy one switching the numbers on two careers, can cause a hell of a lot of pain by assigning an inappropriate set of tasks for people to do. Zero say and the death penalty for disobedience then makes the pain practically irremediable. A lot of the reason for weak and ineffective government is trying to mitigate and limit government's ability to do terribly terribly wicked things, because governments are often highly skilled at doing terribly terribly wicked things, and in unique positions to do so, and can do so by minor accident. You seem to have ignored the possibility of anything going wrong when following your intuition.

Moreover, there's a second possible implicit premise:

These angels hold exactly and only the values shared by all mankind, and correct knowledge about everything.

Imagine someone with different values or beliefs in charge of that all-controlling state with the death penalty. For instance, I have previously observed that Boko Haram has a sliver of a valid point in their criticism of Western education when noting that it appears to have been a major driver in causing Western fertility rates to drop below replacement and show no sign of recovery. Obviously you can't have a wonderful future full of happy people if humans have gone extinct, therefore the Boko Haram state bans Western education on pain of death. For those already poisoned by it, such as you, you will spend your next ten years remedially bearing and rearing children and you are henceforth forbidden access to any and all reading material beyond instructions on diaper packaging. Boko Haram is confident that this is the optimal career for you and that they're maximizing the integral of human happiness over time, despite how much you may scream in the short term at the idea.

With such premises spelled out, I predict people wouldn't object to your ideal world so much as they'd object to the grossly unrealistic prospect. But without such, you're proposing a totalitarian dictatorship and triggering a hell of a lot of warning signs and heuristics and pattern-matching to slavery, tyranny, the Soviet Union, and various other terrible bad things where one party holds absolute power to tell other people how to live their life.

"But it's a benevolent dictatorship", I imagine you saying. Pull the other one, it has bells on. The neoreactionaries at least have a proposed incentive structure to encourage the dictator to be benevolent in their proposal to bring back monarchy. (TL;DR taxes go into the king's purse giving the king a long planning horizon) What have you got? Remember, you are one in seven billion people, you will almost certainly not be in charge of this all-powerful state if it's ever implemented, and when you do your safety design you should imagine it being in the hands of randoms at the least, and of enemies if you want to display caution.

An ideology would just bias my science and make me worse.

I don't know you well enough to say, but it's quite easy to pretend that one has no ideology. For clear thinking it's very useful to understand one's own ideological positions.

There also a difference between doing science and scientism with is about banner wearing.

My intuitions say that specialism increases output, so we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say.

"Greetings, Comrade Acty. Today the Collective has decreed that you..." Do these words make your heart skip a beat in joyous anticipation, no matter how they continue?

Have you read "Brave New World"? "1984"? "With Folded Hands"? Do those depict societies you find attractive?

To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in.

Exinanition is an attractive fantasy for some, but personal fantasies are not a foundation to build a society on.

What I can do is think: a lot of aspects of the current world (war, poverty, disease etc) make me really angry and seem like they also hurt other people other than me, and if I were to absolutely annihilate those things, the world would look like a better place to me and would also better satisfy others' preferences. So I'm going to do that.

You are clearly intelligent, but do you think? You have described the rich intellectual life at your school, but how much of that activity is of the sort that can solve a problem in the real world, rather than a facility at making complex patterns out of ideas? The visions that you have laid out here merely imagine problems solved. People will not do as you would want? Then they will be made to. How? "On pain of death." How can the executioners be trusted? They will be tested to ensure they use the power well.

How will they be tested? Who tests them? How does this system ever come into existence? I'm sure your imagination can come up with answers to all these questions, that you can slot into a larger and larger story. But it would be an exercise in creative fiction, an exercise in invisible dragonology.

And all springing from "My intuitions say that specialism increases output."

I'm going to pursue the elimination of suffering until the suffering stops.

Exterminate all life, then. That will stop the suffering.

I'm sure you're really smart, and will go far. I'm concerned about the direction, though. Right now, I'm looking at an Unfriendly Natural Intelligence.

we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say. Nobody would have property, you would just contribute towards the state of human happiness when the state told you to and then you would be assigned the goods you needed by the state. To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in

Why do you call inhabitants of such a state "citizens"? They are slaves.

To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in

Interesting. So you would like to be a slave.

Unfortunately, everyone else seems to strongly disagree.

...and do you understand why?