The full story
The Fox and the Rook
The fox told the rook a secret of the winter orchard: not every detail deserves to survive translation. The rook wanted a perfect map of every branch, but that would have taken all night and left no room for flight. So the fox taught him rate-distortion theory: choose the smallest description that preserves the features that matter for your goal. The rook learned to keep the bends of the path, the locations of the cold winds, and the nest sites, while discarding the glitter of unnecessary leaves. By dawn, the orchard was smaller on paper yet truer in practice.