Intuitively, the idea makes sense to me. You can only compress something when you reduce the content to “what matters” in it. And understanding “what matters” is to understand the patterns in the data. Understanding the patterns in the data IS intelligence.

There's an important consequence here which I take as a lesson in life and business: it is worth optimizing a process or a workflow in your life or business even when there’s no obvious economic benefit. Because to optimize it is the only way to truly understand it. I am very wary of businesses and software that don’t optimize for performance (not just for profit) because it signals they don’t understand what they are doing. Slow software is poorly understood software. Fast software is also likely to be bug-free and secure because someone understands it.