Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Monthly Roundup #13: December 2023, published by Zvi on December 20, 2023 on LessWrong.

I have not actually forgotten that the rest of the world exists. As usual, this is everything that wasn't worth an entire post and is not being saved for any of the roundup post categories.

(Roundup post categories are currently AI, Medical and Health, Housing and Traffic, Dating, Childhood and Education, Fertility, Startups, and potentially NEPA and Clean Energy.)

Bad News

Rebels from Yemen were firing on ships in the Red Sea, a problem dating back thousands of years. Here's where we were on December 17, with the US government finally dropping the hammer.

Hidden fees exist, even when everyone knows they're there, because they work. StubHub experimented, the hiding meant people spent 21% more money. Companies simply can't pass that up. Government intervention could be justified. However, I also notice that Ticketmaster is now using 'all-in' pricing for many shows with zero hidden fees, despite this problem.

Pollution is a huge deal (paper, video from MRU).

Alec Stapp: Cars spew pollution while waiting at toll booths. Paper uses E-ZPass replacement of toll booths to identify impact of vehicle emissions on public health. Key result: E-ZPass reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 10.8% and 11.8%.

GPT-4 estimated this could have cut vehicle emissions by 10%-30%, so the implied relationship is ludicrously large, even though my quick investigation into the paper said that the estimates above are somewhat overstated.

Optimal chat size can be anywhere from 2 to 8 people who ever actually talk. Ten is already too many.

Emmett Shear: The group chat with 100 incredibly impressive and interesting members is far less valuable than the one with 10.

Ideal in-person chat sizes are more like 2 to at most 5.

The good news in both cases is that if you only lurk, in many ways you do not count.

Simple language is indeed better.

Samo Burja: I've come to appreciate simple language more and more. Careful and consistent use of common words and simple sentences can be just as technically precise.

Ben Landau-Taylor: I'm reading two papers by the same author, one at the start of his career and one after he'd been in the field for two decades. It's remarkable how academic experience makes his prose *worse*. At first his language is clear and straightforward, later it's needlessly complex.

Government Working

IRS changed Section 174, under the 'Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,' such that R&D expenses can only be expensed over 5 years, or overseas over 15 years. All software development counts as R&D for this. If you are big and profitable, you do less R&D but you survive. If you are VC-backed and losing tons of money, you don't owe anything anyway and do not care. If you are a bootstrapping tech company, or otherwise trying to get by, this is death, at a minimum you have to lay off a bunch of staff whose cost you can no longer meaningfully expense.

This is complete insanity. It is obviously bad policy to discourage R&D in this way but I did not fully realize the magnitude of the error. If we do not fix it quickly, it will do massive damage. I don't care whether it makes sense in theory in terms of value, in practice companies are getting tax bills exceeding 100% of their income.

IRS did also notch a recent win. They're cutting college aid application process from over 100 questions down to 18 with auto populated IRS information.

Ashley Schapitl: Thank the IRS for the new 10-minute college aid application process! "The new FAFSA pulls from information the government already has through the IRS to automatically input family income details."

Yes, Matt Bruenig is coming out in favor of all paychecks going directly to the government, which then gives you your cut after. Just think...