Today in learning

The Swiss central bank has massive equity holdings.

The Swiss National Bank has US equity holdings amounting to $167bn, spread across more than 2,300 positions, according to SEC filings from June.

The DeepSeek hype was manufactured?

TL;DR: DeepSeek’s record-breaking hype wasn’t organic — it was powered by thousands of coordinated fake accounts. #what-happened

Evidence:

• Our disinformation research team analysed 41,864 profiles discussing DeepSeek.

• 3,388 were fake accounts — most of them active on X, accounting for about 15% of all engagement on the platform, which is double the usual baseline.

• These accounts generated 2,158 posts on X in a single day, reaching their peak activity.

• The orchestrated amplification made DeepSeek trend across platforms and influence market narratives.

• 44.7% of those fake profiles were created in 2024, aligning with the timing of DeepSeek’s launch

Randomized control tests are not all they are cracked up to be.

Dialectical scientific progress rolls on. Where we once had a crisis of internal validity (the impetus for the credibility revolution), we now have a crisis of external validity. We can conduct an essentially perfect RCT in one time and place; we can be certain that the treatment group and the control group have different outcomes, and that this effect was definitely caused by the treatment and the treatment alone. But this effect cannot be generalized to other times and places. This perfect golden knowledge nugget cannot yet be melted down with other knowledge nuggets. No human mind or machine learning algorithm can forge these nuggets into a holy grail: the ability to reliably predict (with anything near the level of precision of the original studies) what will happen when the treatment from the RCT is deployed again, in the real world.