This was from a dream I had. Not sure of the details, but that’s how it was noted.
Remainder of the note: expert information lives in other people’s brains where they’ve spent years developing it. One can extract that high-value information in a compressed manner, but what about loss on expansion?
I’m not sure that “exaggeration is compression” stated exactly that way is true or clear, but I see where I was going with the remainder of the note (above). The idea is that an expert who has years of information about a topic can give a one or two line summary of an idea that captures a few of the biggest, important details. This is a form of compression or one-way function. You can get some amount of the idea’s value from this compressed version, but you can’t do the further work in that idea space that the expert can do, having access to the remaining details that were lost in the compression.
If this concept makes sense in the human-to-human mode, what about in relation to other forms of “information” outside of the human mind? what about the, let’s call it wisdom of evolution? We might say we “understand” why animal does X or Y, but the amount of time we’ve had with those concepts is far less than the amount of time evolution has had with them. In the same sense as above, we’re getting the compressed version of the information. We can’t do with it the same work that having access to the full set of “raw data” would be able to do with it (as evolution does). I guess the “work” in this sense would be understanding the processes of life in the full sense that the process itself expresses. That level will forever be distant to us.