It’s not intuitively obvious losing information makes things worse. In fact, it’s not even true. Plenty of lossy functions make the problem under consideration better off, such as denoising, optimizing, models that expose underlying useful structures, and on and on.
Also injecting noise can improve many problems, like adding jitter before ADC (think noise shaping, which has tremendous uses).
So claiming things like “can only make the end result worse” is “intuitive obvious” is demonstrably wrong.
Also injecting noise can improve many problems, like adding jitter before ADC (think noise shaping, which has tremendous uses).
So claiming things like “can only make the end result worse” is “intuitive obvious” is demonstrably wrong.