ELA: There are more sobering notes
among the n-grams.
For instance, here's the trajectory of Marc Chagall,
an artist born in 1887.
And this looks like the normal trajectory of a famous person.
He gets more and more and more famous,
except if you look in German.
If you look in German, you see something completely bizarre,
something you pretty much never see,
which is he becomes extremely famous
and then all of a sudden plummets,
going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945,
before rebounding afterward.
And of course, what we're seeing
is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist
in Nazi Germany.
Now these signals
are actually so strong
that we don't need to know that someone was censored.
We can actually figure it out
using really basic signal processing.
Here's a simple way to do it.
Well, a reasonable expectation
is that somebody's fame in a given period of time
should be roughly the average of their fame before
and their fame after.
So that's sort of what we expect.
And we compare that to the fame that we observe.
And we just divide one by the other
to produce something we call a suppression index.
If the suppression index is very, very, very small,
then you very well might be being suppressed.
If it's very large, maybe you're benefiting from propaganda.
