✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Your Clone Wants to Kill You Because You Assumed Too Much — LessWrong

lesswrong.com · 1,480 words · saved by 1 readers

My friend @Croissanthology is puzzled why it is such a common trope for fictional clones to turn on their creators. There's the Doylist answer that it is a cheap way to make for a mind divided against itself, which explains a lot of the drama in my view e.g. pure betrayal. But there's also the Watsonian answer I learnt from that great teacher, Mother of Learning. In the novel Mother of Learning, perhaps the most useful spell is simulacrum. It can be used to make an ectoplasmic shell that looks like you, has a copy of your mind and shares your mana pool. Naturally, the main characters abuse the heck out of this. So useful is it, that they wonder why on earth every great mage doesn't use it. A grizzled old battle mage supplies part of the answer to the question posed by the MC, and in turn our dear Croissant. He says "[...] if you don’t like doing something, your simulacrum won’t like doing it either… so it’s a bad idea to foist things you hate upon your simulacrums. This also means that

x Your Clone Wants to Kill You Because You Assumed Too Much — LessWrong Coordination / Cooperation Rationality World Modeling Frontpage 67 Your Clone Wants to Kill You Because You Assumed Too Much by Algon 15th Nov 2025 2 min read 10 67 My friend @Croissanthology is puzzled why it is such a common trope for fictional clones to turn on their creators . There's the Doylist answer that it is a cheap way to make for a mind divided against itself , which explains a lot of the drama in my view e.g. pure betrayal. But there's also the Watsonian answer I learnt from that great teacher, Mother of Learn

Explore this link on the map →

related reading