yes, when we do this to history, it becomes filled with conspiracies. but is merely a process to 'understand' history by projecting intentionalities.

this 'compression' is what 'understanding' something really entails; at first... but then there's more.

when knowledge becomes understood it enables perception (e.g. we perceive meaning in words once we learn to read).

when we get really good at this understanding-perception we may start to 'manipulate' the abstractions we 'perceive'. an example would be to 'understand a cube' and then being able to rotate it around so to predict what would happen without really needing the cube. but this is an overly simplistic example