Flattening the knowledge

I've been listening to lectures from the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) lately. SFI is a research institute focused on complexity science. Knowledge, learning, and computational modeling are regular topics, as well as my research focus, so I'm enjoying it. You can find a variety of their content at https://www.youtube.com/c/SFIScience/featured.

One recording I especially enjoyed was a lecture by Scott Page given over 10 years ago about his book The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. (I don't have the youtube link but you can find it on castbox.) He explores the mathematical evidence of the value of diversity. In many cases, it turns out that diverse groups of people generate better solutions to problems than a group of experts. It comes down, in part, to the different ways people code and organize the world for themselves, and the variety of tools people can collect to apply to a problem. The guy was really funny, too.

I came across the idea of flattening knowledge when I was listening to some of these lectures while driving. Unfortunately I don't know if it was from the recording above, or maybe Mirta Galesic discussing Social Learning and Decision-making, or any or the others.... But the idea is that, if an educational method or product becomes too widespread, the collective knowledge of humanity gets less. The world is full of people with all sorts of ideas. Constraining all those ideas to one subset of possibilities eliminates the other options, flattening the overall potential. What does this mean for instructional designers?