I'm picking a topic for my Psychology Honours dissertation next year and I've got so many options and interests that the overabundance of choice is near paralyzing. So in the interests of crowd sourcing and hopefully writing about something of substance, I'd like to hear suggestions for potential directions I could take. It can be any idea but one that frequently pops up on less wrong and needs further exploration or exposure would be ideal.

Basically feel free to offer suggestions but ideally I want something that (assuming I do it right) would help lay a part of the groundwork required to build up someones rationality.

I've often seen the issue of lottery tickets crop up on LessWrong and the consensus seems to be that the behaviour is irrational. It highlights for me a confusion that I've had about what it means for something to be "rational" and I'm seeking clarification. I think it might be useful to break the term down into the distinction I learnt about here, epistemic and instrumental rationality.

Epistemic rationality - This seems to be the most common failure of people who play the lottery. It might be an overt failure of probabilistic reasoning like someone believing their chances of winning to be 50-50 because they can imagine two potential outcome. Maybe they believe that they're "due" to win some money as they commit "the gamblers fallacy". Or it might be a more subtle failure resulting from correct knowledge of probability, but a fundamental inability to represent that number we call "scope insensitivity". I think in the cases where these errors are committed, no-one would argue that these people are being "rational".

However, what if someone had a perfect knowledge of the probabilities involved? If this person bought a lottery ticket would we still consider this a failure of epistemic rationality? You might say that anyone with perfect information of these probabilities would know that lottery tickets are poor financial investments, but we're not talking about instrumental rationality just yet.

Instrumental rationality - Now we're talking about it. The criteria for rationality in this case is, acting in a way that achieves your goals. If your goals in buying a lottery ticket are as one dimensional as making money, then the lottery is a (very) poor investment and I don't think anyone else would disagree. Here is where I start getting confused though, because what happens when a lottery ticket satisfies goals other than financial gain? It is conceivable that I could get more than $5's worth (here meaning my subjective and relative sense of what money is worth) of entertainment out of a $5 lottery ticket. What happens here? I hope you can see the more general problem that arises if you'd answer "It's still instrumentally irrational".

I'm not arguing that the lottery is a good idea or that it's socially desirable. I think that it does tend to drain capitol from the people that can least afford it. If you've argued the idea of the lottery to death, pick a different example, it's the underlying concept I'm trying to tease apart. I suppose it boils down to the idea that if an agent makes no instrumental or epistemic errors of rationality, and buys a lottery ticket, can that be irrational?

I would identify myself as holding many trans-humanist values and beliefs. That death and dying are not desirable and that it should, like smallpox, be eradicated. It also occurs to me however that I hold the belief that assisted suicide can sometimes be the right course of action. I can justify this sufficiently to myself, but I have a history of being a sophisticated arguer, so my ability to convince myself isn't great evidence.

Are my beliefs incoherent? I look at both issues and they both still feel right (I'm aware this does not make it so). Are these beliefs contradictory (and if so how)? Or are they justified by some hidden assumptions that I can't seem to acknowledge explicitly?

I get the idea that this is probably borderline appropriate for the discussion forum so I will delete this topic if asked to.

I think that raising the sanity waterline is a worthwhile goal, but picking your battles is absolutely necessary. It doesn't matter how formidable your argument is if you're arguing in the comments of a youtube video, you've lost by default. So where is the line in the  sand? Where would you feel compelled to take action, and to what lengths would you go to? What price would you be willing to pay?

I'm a psychology student, third year and currently doing a unit called "cultural psychology". The lecturer has advanced notions of "multiple truths" and how "reality is socially constructed". To quote him directly in regards to this:

"There is a tendency for those who believe in one reality to use the physical world as a basis for argument, while those who believe in multiple realities use the social world. Even in physics we have 'reality' changing as you get closer to the speed of light, and the laws of physics don't apply prior to the big bang. These are fairly extreme situations. In this course we are dealing with social realities and the point is that different cultures operate in worlds that can be quite different. To see this purely as a perspective risks the dominant social grouping seeing their reality as the true reality, and others as having a different perspective on that reality. The assumption that cultures can have different realities places every on a level playing field with a dominant culture calling all the shots."

You can see in the last line the conclusion he wants his premises to support. The exercise is not to pick his argument apart, find all the holes and write a crushing riposte (although you can if you're so inclined).

The question is, if the goal is to raise the sanity waterline, is this a battle worth picking?