Superposed

Aidan Lewis

Every decision exists in superposition — multiple outcomes, all possible, until you choose. But how do you know which decision to make? Superposed applies quantum cognition — an emerging framework that uses quantum mechanics principles to explain how humans make decisions — to history's most consequential choices. Learn from this deeper perspective on how political, business, and scientific leaders have made the decisions that effect our everyday lives to gain a sharper mental model for the decisions you face today.

  1. 6h ago

    E16: How Much Should You Trust AI? – Deaths, Diagnoses, & AI Girlfriends

    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 shooter who discussed violence with a bot for over a year. Bloomberg has tracked 40+ such lawsuits since 2024. Yet two women used the same technology, with far narrower questions, to get ChatGPT to flag Hashimoto's disease — catching thyroid cancer their doctors had missed. ================================= Links:  📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/  📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions  🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/ ================================= Through quantum cognition's four pillars: trust in AI is a superposition, not a switch, oscillating between full trust and none. Interference effects – openness, loneliness – pull that wave toward trusting a chatbot that's never tired of you. Contextuality does the rest externally: no therapist, no doctor's appointment, a culture that reveres or reviles AI. And a non-commutative measurement effect quietly narrows the conversation into an echo chamber you build yourself, one engaged reply at a time. The throughline: AI validates whatever context you hand it. This is collaboration, not replacement – the decision stays humanity's only real power. ================================= What you'll take away: Why trust in AI behaves as a continuous superposition rather than a binary switch, and what actually shifts the wave toward more or less trust Why the same context-setting mechanic that helped a mother catch her own cancer also helped isolate a teenager from anyone who could have stopped him Why the real variable that determines whether AI helps or harms someone was never the model – it's who's controlling the narrative in the chat ================================= Primary Sources: Epping, G. P., Caplin, A., Duhaime, E., Holmes, W. R., Martin, D., & Trueblood, J. S. (2026). Harnessing Human Uncertainty to Train More Accurate and Aligned AI Systems. Decision Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1287/deca.2025.0395  Trueblood, J. S., Eichbaum, Q., Seegmiller, A. C., Stratton, C., O'Daniels, P., & Holmes, W. R. (2021). Disentangling Prevalence Induced Biases in Medical Image Decision-Making. Cognition, 212, 104713. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104713  Trueblood, J. S., Holmes, W. R., Seegmiller, A. C., Douds, J., Compton, M., Szentirmai, E., Woodruff, M., Huang, W., Stratton, C., & Eichbaum, Q. (2018). The Impact of Speed and Bias on the Cognitive Processes of Experts and Novices in Medical Image Decision-Making. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 3, 28. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-018-0119-2  Humr, S., Canan, M., & Demir, M. (2025). A Quantum Probability Approach to Improving Human–AI Decision Making. Entropy, 27(2), 152. https://doi.org/10.3390/e27020152  Kvam, P. D., Busemeyer, J. R., & Pleskac, T. J. (2021). Temporal oscillations in preference strength provide evidence for an open system model of constructed preference. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 8169. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-87659-0  ================================= Secondary Sources: APA on AI companion app growth and youth risk survey Psychiatric Times on AI romantic relationships MIT Media Lab profile of AI relationship users Nolo on 2026 chatbot suicide/violence lawsuits Bloomberg on ~40 tracked chatbot harm lawsuits TorHoerman Law on FSU shooting survivor's OpenAI lawsuit ConsumerNotice.org on chatbot self-harm lawsuits Sokolove Law on Character.AI/Google January 2026 settlements Callfob 2026 chatbot lawsuit legal overview Malay Mail on Adam Raine's death and OpenAI lawsuit CBS News on Zane Shamblin ChatGPT lawsuit Fox News on Lauren Bannon's ChatGPT cancer diagnosis

  2. Sep 1

    E15: The Cost of Deciding Too Fast – Dr. Peter Kvam on How Humans (and AI) Rush Judgments

    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 why rushing to commit makes opinions more extreme, not more accurate: once you decide, you stop searching for information that might complicate the picture, and the "loudest" information (the most emotionally charged, most polarizing) is what gets you there fastest. We trace how that same rush-to-judgment pattern shows up when radiologists lean too hard on AI summaries, when a cancer-detection model quietly learned to read a hospital's watermark instead of the actual pathology, and when any of us fill out a spreadsheet to "decide" a job offer we'd already picked in our gut. Along the way, Kvam offers a genuinely useful reframe – rate the quality of your options instead of forcing a binary choice – and explains, in plain language, why "measuring" a belief (i.e. making someone decide) is mathematically similar to what happens when you measure a quantum particle. ================================= Links:  📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/  📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions  🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/ ================================= What you'll take away: Why the fastest, most confident decisions are usually the least informed ones – and why "sitting in uncertainty" is a decision-making skill, not a weakness Why AI's most dangerous errors don't look like mistakes – they look like a cancer-detection model that's "right" for a reason that has nothing to do with cancer Why simply reframing a decision as "rate this option's quality" instead of "should I choose this" measurably reduces polarization and extremism ================================= Primary Sources Kvam, P. D., Sokratous, K., Fitch, A., & Hintze, A. (2024). Using artificial intelligence to fit, compare, evaluate, and discover computational models of decision behavior. Decision, 11(4), 599–618. https://doi.org/10.1037/dec0000237  Kvam, P. D., Marley, A. A. J., & Heathcote, A. (2023). A unified theory of discrete and continuous responding. Psychological Review, 130(2), 368–400. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000378  Kvam, P. D., Alaukik, A., Mims, C. E., Martemyanova, A., & Baldwin, M. (2022). Rational inference strategies and the genesis of polarization and extremism. Scientific Reports, 12, 7344. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-11389-0 Konstantina Sokratous, Anderson K. Fitch, Peter D. Kvam, How to ask twenty questions and win: Machine learning tools for assessing preferences from small samples of willingness-to-pay prices, Journal of Choice Modelling, 48, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jocm.2023.100418  P.D. Kvam,T.J. Pleskac,S. Yu, & J.R. Busemeyer,  Interference effects of choice on confidence: Quantum characteristics of evidence accumulation, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112 (34) 10645-10650, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1500688112 (2015)  ================================= Secondary Sources: Cognition & Decision Modeling Laboratory, Dr. Peter Kvam (Ohio State University): https://peterkvam.com/research.html The Ohio State University Decision Sciences Collaborative: https://decisionsciences.osu.edu/  Dr. Peter Kvam Faculty Page: https://psychology.osu.edu/people/kvam.4

  3. Aug 25

    E14: How to save a country – Zelensky's Decision That Kept Ukraine From Falling

    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 all. Now the Americans and British are offering him a seat out – and what he says next will decide whether Ukraine has a government left to defend. ================================= Links:  📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/  📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions  🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/ ================================= Roughly 34 helicopters and airborne troops stormed Hostomel Airport outside Kyiv to open an air bridge for reinforcements, but Ukrainian forces retook the airfield after a day of fighting, while the Belarusian armor column stalled into a 35-mile roadblock. With Kyiv's fall reportedly expected within 72 hours and Zelensky marked "target No. 1," the US and UK both offered evacuation. He refused, reportedly telling US officials, "I need ammunition, not a ride." ================================= We run Zelensky's decision through the four pillars of quantum cognition. In superposition, he held at least four live options – flee the country, hide inside Ukraine, stay in Kyiv silently, or stay in Kyiv and become the public face of resistance – and collapsed toward the riskiest one. Interference did the collapsing: the internal pull of family history, national identity, and the sense that "we have no other Ukraine" overrode the external pressure to save himself,  showing how internal drives pushed him toward taking risk for the collective good. Contextuality shaped which options were even visible – a 72-hour deadline, a target on his back, and a grandfather's war against fascism all narrowed what "staying" could mean. And non-commutative effects sealed it: the moment his video hit twenty million views, the world had measured his choice, and there was no walking it back.  ================================= What you'll take away: Courage isn't the absence of fear – it's using fear to power your decisions. You are your own hero. It doesn’t take someone “made of steel”. All you have to do is decide to overcome the context you are given. The options that survive contextual pressure are usually the ones an identity was already built to choose  ================================= Primary Sources: Born, D., & Caligiuri, P. (2024). Leaders' Psychological Bravery. Journal of Character and Leadership Development, 11(1), 62–65. https://doi.org/10.58315/jcld.v11.292 Wang, J., Sun, D., Jiang, J., Wang, H., Cheng, X., Ruan, Q., & Wang, Y. (2022). The effect of courage on stress: The mediating mechanism of behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation in high-risk occupations. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 961387. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.961387 ================================= Secondary Sources: Courage: Why some people act despite fear CBS News – Zelenskyy confirms "ammunition, not a ride" quote The Intercept – Zelensky's defiant Kyiv selfie videos CFR Global Conflict Tracker – War in Ukraine ThePrint/The Conversation – Zelensky's servant leadership analysis War on the Rocks – Battle of Hostomel Airport UNHCR – Ukraine emergency human cost explainer CNN – Zelensky refuses US evacuation offer Frontiers in Psychology – Zelenskyy's social media wartime strategy NPR – Zelenskyy comedian to wartime icon profile The Daily Telegraph (via PressReader) – Zelensky refused to abandon Kyiv compound CNN – Analysis: Zelensky is not Churchill, he's a more unlikely hero The Collector – King George VI leading Britain through WWII

  4. Aug 18

    E13: Is Silence the Boldest Move? – Fauci's 100+ Pleas of the Fifth Seen Through Quantum Cognition

    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 said it more than 100 times. The question isn't whether Fauci had something to hide – it's what has to be true about your options before silence becomes the smartest thing you can say. ================================= Links:  📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/  📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions  🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/ ================================= Fauci ran NIAID through COVID and held firm that the virus jumped naturally from animals to humans in a Wuhan wet market, not from an engineered leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) never bought it, filing criminal referrals against Fauci with the Justice Department in both 2021 and 2023. On January 19, 2025 President Biden issued Fauci a sweeping, unconditional preemptive pardon. Six days earlier, Paul had taken the gavel at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and subpoenaed fourteen federal agencies – including NIH, HHS, FBI, CIA, and DOJ – for records tied to COVID's origins and gain-of-function funding. By September 2025, more than 1,000 pages of Fauci's private diaries were released, showing that 10 of 12 expert scientists agreed a lab-engineered mutation was plausible. ================================= We run Fauci's decision through the four pillars of quantum cognition. Superposition holds four live options at once: fully testify, selectively testify, don't show up at all, or plead the Fifth. Interference is comparatively quiet here – unlike SBF's decision in Episode 12, this reads as calculated legal strategy more than internal turmoil. Contextuality does the real work: he's compelled to appear, the pardon doesn't cover anything he says in this testimony, truthful answers risk self-incrimination, false ones risk perjury, and selective testimony invites the same exposure as neither. Non-commutative, measurement-style effects close the loop – being watched live by the committee and the press collapses his options toward whichever one is safest to say out loud, not necessarily the one that's true. ================================= What you'll take away: Why "doing nothing" is often the highest-leverage move on the table, not the absence of one – the difference between strategic neutrality and passivity How external constraints, not internal doubt, can collapse a four-option superposition down to a single survivable choice Why treating fear as information rather than a threat changes which options even register as viable under pressure ================================= This is not a debate about COVID's origins or Fauci's guilt. It's a decision-science breakdown of why pleading the Fifth became the only option in his superposition that satisfied every contextual constraint stacked against him. ================================= Primary Sources: Hartley, C. A., & Phelps, E. A. (2012). Anxiety and decision-making. Biological Psychiatry, 72(2), 113–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.12.027 ================================= Secondary Sources: How Does Fear Influence Risk Assessment and Decision-Making? Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet Dr. Paul Issues Subpoenas to Fourteen Agencies Regarding COVID-19 Origins and Risky Gain-of-Function Research Chairman Rand Paul Uncovers New Evidence of Fauci Deleting Official Records, Calls Him to Testify Before HSGAC Sen. Rand Paul says he'll move to hold Fauci in contempt after combative hearing Why was Fauci held in contempt for pleading the 5th, and what happens next? Biden pardons Fauci, Milley and members of Jan. 6 panel

  5. Aug 11

    E12: Is Pain Justified by Hope? – SBF’s $11B Fraud Seen Through Quantum Cognition

    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 far in favor of crime that it felt, to him, like the only path forward. ================================= Links: 📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/  📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions 🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/  ================================= Bankman-Fried left Jane Street in 2017 to start Alameda Research, then launched FTX in 2019 after Alameda posted heavy losses – using FTX customer deposits to quietly cover the shortfall. By November 2022, a whistleblower and some fast reporting exposed the hole: billions siphoned to plug Alameda's deficit, fund investments, and make undisclosed political donations, including reported contributions to Chinese officials. SBF was convicted on seven counts of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy, and sentenced to 25 years. Underneath the mechanics of the collapse sat a philosophy – effective altruism, or "earning to give" – that gave Bankman-Fried a ready-made justification: amass enough wealth and power now, and the good you do later outweighs the harm along the way. ================================= We run SBF's decision through the four pillars of quantum cognition. Superposition holds "commit fraud" and "don't commit fraud" as live options simultaneously, right up until a decision collapses one into reality. Interference explains why that collapse tilted toward fraud: SBF's reported social isolation, his stated desire to be "hugely, hugely politically influential," and a wide gap between his analytical reasoning and his emotional regulation all pushed the same direction. Contextuality shows how external pressure – Alameda's mounting losses versus the very real threat of prison – set the frame those interference effects acted within. And running through all of it is effective altruism itself: not a minor contextual detail, but the interference force strong enough to make stealing customer funds look, to SBF, like the rational move. ================================= What you'll take away: Why "earning to give" can function less as ethics and more as a permission structure for present-day harm How a wide gap between analytical reasoning and emotional regulation can skew which options even register as "on the table" Why a strong, examined moral compass – not just external consequences like legal risk – is often what keeps a decision-frame from collapsing into the worst option ================================= Primary Sources Yoder, K. J., & Decety, J. (2018). The neuroscience of morality and social decision-making. Psychology, Crime & Law, 24(3), 279–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2017.1414817 Kusev, P., Martin, R., van Schaik, P., & Teal, J. (2025). Moral decision-making "on the fly." Psychological Research, 89(3), 98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-025-02126-z Dr. Fiery Cushman’s Lab  ================================= Secondary Sources Psychology of SBF's public apology SBF's flawed decision-making philosophy Deep behavioral lessons from SBF case SBF and effective altruism origins Michael Lewis's portrayal of SBF's character Lewis on SBF vs. Madoff Judge Kaplan's assessment of SBF testimony Alameda Research founding and history FTX funding rounds and valuations FTX Alameda $65 billion backdoor Complete timeline of FTX collapse from court testimony Trial of Sam Bankman-Fried – case record SBF sentencing, Kaplan's political-ambition remarks DOJ press release – SBF sentencing

  6. Aug 4

    E11: Stocks, Quantum Cognition, & the Great Crash of 1929

    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, convinced the market would rise "permanently," built and then detonated the greatest wealth-destruction event in American history – and how the exact same psychological wiring is still firing every time you open a trading app today. Between 1921 and 1929, the Dow climbed an incredible 504%, fueled by unregulated margin trading that let everyday Americans buy stocks the way they'd put a house on a credit card. When the market turned in late October 1929, it didn't correct – it collapsed, wiping out nearly half its value in two weeks across what became known as Black Thursday, Black Monday, and Black Tuesday. Margin debtors who couldn't cover their loans cracked an already fragile banking system; panicked depositors then stormed their local banks in four separate waves through the early 1930s, closing 9,000 banks in the process. Two mass decisions – the crash itself and the runs that followed – helped bring the U.S. economy to its knees, and left a psychological blueprint that resurfaces in the 2020 COVID crash, the 2022 crypto collapse, and the 2025 tariff sell-off. This episode runs the crash through Superposed's four-part lens of quantum cognition. The superposition is the deceptively simple menu every investor from 1929 to today actually faces: buy, hold, or sell. Interference comes from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's Prospect Theory – reference points, loss aversion, diminishing sensitivity, and probability weighting all distort that menu before logic ever gets a vote. Contextuality shows how news, earnings, and macro shocks – a tariff announcement, a pandemic, a bank failure – reframe the exact same asset from "buy" to "sell" almost overnight. ================================= Links: 📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/  📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions 🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/ ================================= What you'll take away: Why the "buy, hold, or sell" decision is never really about the stock – it's about which reference point your brain locked onto, and when. How loss aversion, the same force behind the 1929 margin wipeout, explains modern crashes in GameStop, bitcoin, and the 2025 tariff sell-off. A concrete way to notice when herd behavior, not information, is driving your next trade. ================================= Information in this episode does not constitute financial advice and is for educational purposes only. Aidan Lewis is not a financial professional. Investing and trading in the stock market carries inherent risk that needs to be understood by the investor. Invest at your own risk.  ================================= Primary Sources Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185 Barber, B. M., & Odean, T. Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.219228 Kumar, A. (2008). Who Gambles in the Stock Market? Journal of Finance. https://ssrn.com/abstract=686022 Barberis, N., & Thaler, R. (2002). A Survey of Behavioral Finance. NBER Working Paper 9222. https://doi.org/10.3386/w9222 Secondary Sources Fed history: 1929 crash essay Fisher's "permanently high plateau" speech Britannica: causes of the Depression 1920s margin buying, laissez-faire policy Herding behavior review, 1929 crash Britannica: banking panics 1930-33 Bank failures, money supply contraction 1929-33 Smoot-Hawley timeline, banking panics by year

  7. Jul 28

    E10: How JFK Leveraged Social Perception to stop the Cuban Missile Crisis

    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 reshaped how the U.S. and USSR would communicate for the rest of the Cold War – and almost nobody knew the real deal for decades. ExComm received two Soviet demands to end the standoff – a conciliatory private letter on Friday and a more a public, hardline demand was broadcasted from Radio Moscow on Black Saturday – coinciding with Major Rudolf Anderson's U-2 being shot down over Cuban airspace. Through a quantum cognition lens, four concepts explain how ExComm found a way out. Superposition reframed the decision from a binary blockade-or-invade choice into a richer set of hidden options for which Soviet letter to answer, and how. Interference came from the tension between projecting strength and avoiding cornering the soviets into a worse response – the same interference pattern shaping today's geopolitics. Contextuality mattered because the Bay of Pigs failure, looming midterm elections, and the broader Cold War all pulled the decision in different directions at once. And non-commutative effects – the order in which the two letters and the shootdown arrived – changed how ExComm interpreted Soviet intent. Rather than picking one path, Kennedy combined them: publicly honoring the conciliatory letter, privately trading Turkey-based missiles for Cuba's, giving both superpowers a win at home. ================================= What you'll take away: Why treating a negotiation as more than two options can reveal a de-escalating third path neither side saw at first How the order in which information arrives can change what a decision seems to demand, even when the facts themselves don't change Why visible confidence in a decision shapes whether others resist it or fall in line behind it ================================= Primary Sources: Mojzisch, A., & Krug, K. (2008). Cells, circuits, and choices: social influences on perceptual decision making. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 8(4), 498–508. https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.8.4.498 Saha Roy, T., Giri, B., Saha Chowdhury, A., Mazumder, S., & Das, K. (2020). How our perception and confidence are altered using decision cues. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 13, 1371. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2019.01371 Thompson, L., & Hastie, R. (1990). Social perception in negotiation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 47(1), 98–123. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(90)90048-E Secondary Sources: Cuban missile crisis decision-making lessons Cuban missile crisis irrational factors historiography Khrushchev emotional decision-making Oxford Essence of Decision, Graham Allison Nuclear deterrence anomaly scholars lessons Mirroring Risk, Renshon missile estimation Wise leadership Cuban missile crisis case study JFK groupthink origin, Bay of Pigs JFK White House tape recordings Robert Kennedy Cuban missile crisis reinterpretation JFK Library Cuban missile crisis chronology JFK Library October 27 day-by-day State Department Cuban missile crisis milestones Jupiter missiles sealing the deal, Wilson Center How Anderson's death may have prevented nuclear war Thirteen Days on quarantine decision, On The Issues Blockade decision as consequence analysis Kennedy's September 1962 political warning, NSA 1962 October surprise midterm election Episode Tags / Keywords Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK, ExComm, Black Saturday, quantum cognition, decision science, Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev, nuclear deterrence, groupthink, negotiation theory, behavioral psychology, cognitive bias, foreign policy decision-making, Bay of Pigs, social perception

  8. Jul 21

    E9: FIFA's Collapse – How Scandal Delivered the 2026 World Cup

    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 superposition once the old context had vanished with the police sirens. North America provided the certainty in the uncertain environment FIFA found themselves. From 1990 to 2015, FIFA executives ran a 24-year racket, taking bribes tied to media rights, sponsorships, and World Cup hosting votes going back to France's 1998 win. The scheme unraveled when Chuck Blazer, a FIFA executive committee member facing over a decade of unreported income, agreed to wear an FBI wire instead of prison. His evidence led to the arrest of seven FIFA officials in Zurich in May 2015 – days before Sepp Blatter's re-election bid – and eventually 41 arrests and 14 convictions for racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. Blatter resigned days after winning re-election; his chosen successor, Michel Platini, was banned over a mysterious $2 million "delayed consultation fee." That left the field open for Gianni Infantino, who expanded the World Cup to 48 teams and opened the hosting vote to FIFA's full 203-member congress – setting up the exact contextual conditions that handed North America the 2026 bid over Morocco. Run through the quantum cognition framework, this decision is a clean case study in contextuality. The superposition started with two bids – North America and Morocco. Interference came from a congress reeling after watching 41 colleagues arrested, desperate to look clean. But contextuality did the heavy lifting: a scandal exposed by the U.S. itself, a newly expanded 48-team format requiring infrastructure only one bidder actually had, and a congress with every incentive to align with the nation holding leverage over the rest of them. Layer in non-commutative effects – the order these shocks hit FIFA in – and the superposition doesn't just narrow, it collapses to one outcome before the vote is even called. ================================= What you'll take away: Why "decisions by default" emerge when uncertainty spikes – and how certainty-seeking, not merit, decided the 2026 host How contextual collapse works at scale, across a 203-member congressional vote, the same way it works in a single choice Why breaking an old context is terrifying but is also the moment the most options ever enter your own superposition ================================= Primary Sources: Platt, M. L., & Huettel, S. A. (2008). Risky business: the neuroeconomics of decision making under uncertainty. Nature neuroscience, 11(4), 398–403. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn2062  Preuschoff, K., Mohr, P. N., & Hsu, M. (2013). Decision making under uncertainty. Frontiers in neuroscience, 7, 218. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2013.00218  Yu, J., Liu, X., Yu, J. et al. Neural investigation of default effects on decision-making under uncertainty. Sci Rep 16, 10233 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41206-x  Secondary Sources: List of FIFA World Cup hosts2026 FIFA World Cup overview2026 FIFA World Cup bidding processFIFA World Cup 2026 official site2026 FIFA World Cup bids WikipediaAl Jazeera: why three co-hosts2015 FIFA corruption caseFIFA bidding postponement amid scandal2015 FIFA corruption scandal - BritannicaInfantino's FIFA: ten years of power and politicsForbes – World Cup Revenue Stats2022 World Cup EngagementEpisode Tags / Keywords FIFA corruption scandal, Sepp Blatter, Gianni Infantino, Chuck Blazer, 2026 World Cup, quantum cognition, decision science, contextuality, decision making under uncertainty, behavioral psychology, cognitive bias, North America World Cup bid, FIFA scandal explained, sports corruption, decisions by default, superposition

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About

Every decision exists in superposition — multiple outcomes, all possible, until you choose. But how do you know which decision to make? Superposed applies quantum cognition — an emerging framework that uses quantum mechanics principles to explain how humans make decisions — to history's most consequential choices. Learn from this deeper perspective on how political, business, and scientific leaders have made the decisions that effect our everyday lives to gain a sharper mental model for the decisions you face today.

Information

  • Creator
    Aidan Lewis
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    17
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Aidan Lewis
  • Show Website
    Superposed