In the dual interest of increasing your pleasantness to interact with and your epistemic rationality, I will point out that your last paragraph is false. You are allowed to care about anything and everything you may happen to care about or choose to care about. As an aspiring epistemic rationalist, the way in which you are bound is to be honest with yourself about message-description lengths, and your own values and your own actions, and the tradeoffs they reflect.
If a crazy person holding a gun said to you (and you believed) “i will shoot you unless you tell me that you are a yellow dinosaur named Timothy”, your epistemic rationality is not compromised by lying to save your life (as long as you are aware it is a lie). Similarly, if you value human social groups, whether intrinsically or instrumentally, you are allowed to externally use longer-than-necessary description lengths if you so choose without any bit of damage to your own epistemic rationality. You may worry that you damage the epistemic rationality of the group or its members, but damaging a community by using the shortest description lengths could also do damage to its epistemic rationality.
In the dual interest of increasing your pleasantness to interact with and your epistemic rationality, I will point out that your last paragraph is false. You are allowed to care about anything and everything you may happen to care about or choose to care about. As an aspiring epistemic rationalist, the way in which you are bound is to be honest with yourself about message-description lengths, and your own values and your own actions, and the tradeoffs they reflect.
If a crazy person holding a gun said to you (and you believed) “i will shoot you unless you tell me that you are a yellow dinosaur named Timothy”, your epistemic rationality is not compromised by lying to save your life (as long as you are aware it is a lie). Similarly, if you value human social groups, whether intrinsically or instrumentally, you are allowed to externally use longer-than-necessary description lengths if you so choose without any bit of damage to your own epistemic rationality. You may worry that you damage the epistemic rationality of the group or its members, but damaging a community by using the shortest description lengths could also do damage to its epistemic rationality.