Every financial IT system eventually develops what engineers call 'legacy debt' — layers of workarounds so normalized that no one can explain why the original patch was needed. The 14th-century logician Jean Buridan noticed something structurally identical in how institutions reason: decisions get made, then the reasoning behind them gets forgotten, but the decision hardens into procedure. What remains is the output with the rationale quietly amputated. Buridan called this a failure of the 'appetitive intellect' — the part of practical judgment that should keep asking *why* before it acts, not just *how*. In finance IT specifically, this shows up as data pipelines feeding dashboards that once tracked a meaningful signal and now track a proxy of a proxy of that signal — with everyone downstream treating the number as authoritative. The discipline Buridan advocated wasn't skepticism about every tool; it was periodic 'final cause audits' — tracing any working system back to the original purpose it was built to serve, and checking whether it still serves it.

Pick one report, dashboard, or data feed you use regularly — what was the original business question it was built to answer, and is that still the question anyone is actually asking?

Drawing from Scholastic Philosophy (Jean Buridan / Late Medieval Logic and Practical Reason) — Jean Buridan (Quaestiones in Aristotelis De Anima, c. 1330s, on the appetitive intellect and the necessity of preserving the final cause in practical judgment)