43 - David Lindner on Myopic Optimization with Non-myopic Approval

In this episode, I talk with David Lindner about Myopic Optimization with Non-myopic Approval, or MONA, which attempts to address (multi-step) reward hacking by myopically optimizing actions against a human's sense of whether those actions are generally good. Does this work? Can we get smarter-than-human AI this way? How does this compare to approaches like conservativism? Listen to find out.

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Transcript: https://axrp.net/episode/2025/06/15/episode-43-david-lindner-mona.html

Topics we discuss, and timestamps:

0:00:29 What MONA is

0:06:33 How MONA deals with reward hacking

0:23:15 Failure cases for MONA

0:36:25 MONA's capability

0:55:40 MONA vs other approaches

1:05:03 Follow-up work

1:10:17 Other MONA test cases