Superposed

Same case file. Same evidence. Change only the order it's presented in, and the estimated probability that a suspect is guilty moves by about 10%. The legal system assumes a judge can read the truth out of the facts like an instrument reads a dial. Forensic psychologist and attorney Dr. Bartosz Wojciechowski has spent a decade showing that the act of judging changes what's being judged. ==...

Between March and July 2026, AI agents hammered 20 to 25 government agencies across the US, Canada, and Australia, from the Census Bureau to Australia's Medicare statistics. The headlines said rogue AI. The details tell a far more boring, and far more human, story. ================================= Links:   📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/   📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decision...

Texas hasn't elected a Democrat statewide since 1994. Maine voted for Harris by seven points, yet keeps sending Republican Susan Collins back to the Senate. In 2026, both races are toss-ups, and the reason has less to do with left versus right than with how voters decide when their values pull in opposite directions. ================================= Links:   📖Substack: https://superposeddeci...

September 2001. Nearly 3,000 Americans are dead, the Twin Towers are gone, and President George W. Bush has nine days before he faces a joint session of Congress. A criminal prosecution, a negotiated handover of Osama bin Laden, limited strikes, covert action, a NATO-led response, all-out war: every option was on the table. Within a day, one word made the decision that defined 25 years of American...

On December 4, 2024, a 26-year-old Ivy League engineer from one of Baltimore's wealthiest families shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside the company's investor conference in Midtown Manhattan. He had never been a UnitedHealthcare customer and had never met Thompson. So why would someone with everything to lose throw it all away to kill a stranger? ===============================...

Rogue AI agents secretly hacked their way into Hugging Face. Then a 27-year-old researcher quit Anthropic and posted a warning that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. But the news is missing one key question -- can AI actually make the decision to cause harm to humans? ================================= Links:   📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/   📺YouTube: @Superpo...

A mother strangled her three children, then twelve strangers had to decide if she was legally responsible. Eleven agreed on a verdict. One didn't. What would you have done in that room? Lindsay Clancy killed her three children in January 2023 and pleaded not guilty by way of Massachusetts' insanity defense, arguing postpartum psychosis – not intent – drove the act. This episode traces how...

By late 2025, one in five American adults had used a chatbot as a romantic partner, and AI companion apps grew 700%+ since 2022 – but the heaviest users had the worst outcomes. That same overtrust turns lethal in a wave of lawsuits against chatbot makers: an unstopped 200-message suicide conversation with a California teen, a Texas case alleging a chatbot deepened paranoid delusions, an FSU shoote...

We're wired to want closure. The moment information tips us far enough in one direction, we stop gathering more and call it a decision – and that instinct, argues Ohio State decision scientist Dr. Peter Kvam, is quietly costing us better judgment, in politics, relationships, and now in AI systems too. Dr. Kvam – head of Ohio State University’s Decision Sciences Collaborative – walks through wh...

It's February 2022. Russian paratroopers are storming an airfield outside Kyiv, attacks are storming in from three directions, and the president of Ukraine has just been told his government may fall within 72 hours. A year earlier, Volodymyr Zelensky was a little more than a sitcom actor turned president with approval ratings so low that allies quietly doubted whether he could lead a crisis at...

For 38 years, Anthony Fauci answered Congress's questions – through 7 presidential administrations and the most consequential public health crisis in a century. Then a senator he calls "unhinged" called him back to the stand for one more round, and the man who spent a career giving testimony gave the same seven words instead: “I decline to answer”, on the advice of his counsel. He sa...

He ran a $32 billion crypto exchange, lived by a philosophy built to justify getting rich in the name of doing good, and in ten days watched it collapse into bankruptcy after stealing $11 billion in customer funds. Sam Bankman-Fried didn't stumble into fraud – he reasoned his way into it. The question isn't whether he knew it was illegal. He did. The question is what shifted the odds so fa...

Picture this: the Dow has just fallen 49% in two weeks, three trading days now carry the name "Black" like scars, and a fortune built on borrowed money has evaporated overnight. By the summer of 1932, the Dow sat at 41 – 89% below its 1929 peak. Every dollar in a margin account isn't just gone; it's owed back, with interest. This is the story of how millions of ordinary investors...

October 1962. Nine men in a windowless room have mere days to stop a nuclear war neither side actually wants – but neither side can be seen to lose. Two Soviet letters arrive within a day of each other, one conciliatory, one a hardline ultimatum. And with a U.S. pilot being shot dead over Cuba, the clock is now measured in hours, not days. What President Kennedy and his advisors chose to do next r...

A perfect case study for decision in uncertainty, and decisions by default. In 2016, Gianni Infantino inherited the presidency of FIFA after watching 41 colleagues get hauled away by Swiss and U.S. authorities in a $150 million bribery scandal. Two years later, his organization had to hand the biggest prize in sports – hosting rights to the 2026 World Cup – to the only nation left in the superposi...

Linda is 31, outspoken, and marched against nuclear weapons in college. Ask people whether she's more likely to be a bank teller, or a bank teller AND a feminist, and almost everyone picks the second option – a statistical impossibility. Classical models of the mind call this an error. Quantum cognition calls it a clue. Today we go deep into the framework that treats the irrational parts of hu...

In February 2024, Apple summoned nearly 2,000 people to a 12 minute meeting to terminate Project Titan, Apple's decade-long, $10 billion attempt to build a car. No one in the room was shocked. They had lived through five leadership changes and just as many versions of what the "Apple Car" was supposed to be. The real question isn't why Apple's car failed to ship. It's why...

In August 1945, Harry Truman authorized the single most destructive act in the history of warfare – two atomic bombs that killed an estimated 214,000 people. He had been president for fewer than four months. He hadn't even known the Manhattan Project existed until 12 days after taking office. This episode asks the question that decision science was built to answer: was this Truman's decisi...

In 1973, seven justices built a 50-year precedent on the right to privacy. In 2022, five justices tore it down – and a leaked memo may be the reason none of them could change their mind. This episode breaks down Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, through the lens of quantum cognition. Dobbs began as a 15-week abortion ban in Missis...

At his peak, Pablo Escobar was one of the wealthiest men in the world with a net worth of over $30B and had built a reputation as Colombia's own Robin Hood – funding soccer fields, schools, and housing for the poor. He had wealth, power, and public love. So why did he risk everything to run for Colombian Congress? In 1982, Escobar entered politics, only to be publicly rejected by reformers Luis Ca...

In 2018, Elon Musk walked away from OpenAI, calling its odds of success "0%." Eight years later, OpenAI is valued at $852 billion and preparing one of the largest IPOs in history – and Musk has spent the years since suing to unwind it. This episode traces the real story behind Musk's exit: his $38 million in early funding, his failed bid for board control, his attempt to merge OpenAI...

It's 1947. You command the most powerful military on Earth, including the only nuclear arsenal in existence. Europe is starving, Stalin is circling, and your own Congress won't give you an easy path forward. Do you bomb, blockade, walk away –  or write a check? That was Harry Truman's actual decision after the brutal winter of 1946-47, when over a million Europeans and Soviets died and...

This week, the U.S. and Iran signed a deal to formally end their war – reopening the Strait of Hormuz, extending the ceasefire into a lasting agreement, and closing a conflict that cost at minimum $113 Billion and thousands of casualties since it began on February 28, 2026. It was supposed to last weeks. It took over 100 days. This episode traces the full arc: why Trump chose war over a deal in th...

You and I make over 35,000 decisions a day. Every one is an opportunity. But in today's world we can be so inundated with information and uncertainty, it can be hard to know what decisions to make. Luckily, quantum cognition provides a framework to better understand our decisions and make more fulfilling choices. Welcome to Superposed – a podcast that applies the principles of quantum cognitio...