When a system works perfectly, it starts lying to you. The medieval Jewish philosopher Gersonides warned against this — but the same trap appears in a more modern form in the work of Donald Schön, who noticed that technical professionals develop what he called 'overlearned competence': the very fluency that makes you fast also makes you stop noticing what you're actually doing. In finance IT, this surfaces when dashboards, data pipelines, and reporting layers become so familiar that the team stops distinguishing between the map and the territory — the model output is treated as the fact, not a representation of it. Schön's remedy wasn't skepticism for its own sake; it was 'reflection-in-action' — the disciplined habit of pausing mid-execution to ask what your current schema is actually assuming, before the output ships. Today, pick one system you trust completely and ask what it can't see.

What is the one output in your stack that everyone reads but no one has questioned the logic of in over a year — and what would it take to get the original author in a room to explain it from scratch?

Drawing from Reflective Practice / Philosophy of Professional Knowledge — Donald Schön (The Reflective Practitioner, 1983, on reflection-in-action and the limits of technical rationality)