An improved bound on $\ell_q$ norms of noisy functions

Let $T_{\epsilon}$, $0 \le \epsilon \le 1/2$, be the noise operator acting on functions on the boolean cube $\{0,1\}^n$. Let $f$ be a nonnegative function on $\{0,1\}^n$ and let $q \ge 1$. In arXiv:1809.09696 the $\ell_q$ norm of $T_{\epsilon} f$ was upperbounded by the average $\ell_q$ norm of conditional expectations of $f$, given sets whose elements are chosen at random with probability $\lambda$, depending on $q$ and on $\epsilon$. In this note we prove this inequality for integer $q \ge 2$ with a better (smaller) parameter $\lambda$. The new inequality is tight for characteristic functions of subcubes. As an application, following arXiv:2008.07236, we show that a Reed-Muller code $C$ of rate $R$ decodes errors on $\mathrm{BSC}(p)$ with high probability if $$R ~<~ 1 - \log_2\left(1 + \sqrt{4p(1-p)}\right).$$ This is a (minor) improvement on the estimate in arXiv:2008.07236.