brilee comments on Compression progress, social niches, and culture - Less Wrong
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I've thought along these lines for a while too, although I can't help but feel that this might be another "just-so" ev-psych story.
I don't see it so much as a compression scheme as a refined-model-of-the-world. I see it more as a lossy vs. lossless compression improvement. For example, as we learn more, we create more, not fewer categories. (For example, once you learn the resolution to the tree falls in a forest story, you now have refined sound into "sound-1" and "sound-2")
This neatly explain why we find irony so delicious - it presents to us directly a contradiction in our categorization scheme, and an opportunity for improving our model of the world.