Refinement is the process of removing unnecessary elements from a thing. It’s often good. Refining silicon or aluminum is important to make mobile phones. It can also be bad. Coca or corn are innocuous until you refine them down to cocaine or high-fructose corn syrup. These are dangerous because once pure, they can be consumed in unnatural densities. You’d have to eat an impossible amount of coca leaves to get the same effect as a line of cocaine, let alone die from an overdose.
Ideas can be refined. Removing unnecessary elements from complex ideas is important for their distribution. But like coca leaves, ideas can be oversimplified to a dangerous degree. In the wrong refinery, the complexities of globalization can be refined all the way down to “immigrants are bad”, “we must leave the EU”, and so on. Removing the complexities from ideas can lead to gross misrepresentations. At the same time, it’s hard for ideas to scale without making them easy to consume.