What is community knowledge evolution?

Community knowledge evolution is a concept in personal epistemology: Shared schemas in teams or cultures change more slowly than individual ones.

Example: You read a paper that changes how you think about system reliability. Within a day, your personal mental model has shifted. But your team still operates on the old assumptions — reviewing outages with the old framework, assigning blame with the old causal model. Six months later, you bring it up in a retro, and someone says 'that's just how we do it here.' The team schema didn't evolve. It calcified.

This concept is part of Phase 16 (Schema Evolution) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema evolution.