UN
Article
UN is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between March 23, 2021 and October 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “the various institutions set up to prevent those wars - the Concert of Europe, multilateral alliances, the UN”; “fictional future UN government higher-up Chrisjen Avasarala”; “Under pressure from the US and UN to control exponentially rising populations”. It most often appears alongside COVID, Scott, India.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 8
- Issue count: 8
- First seen: March 23, 2021
- Last seen: October 13, 2025
Appears In
- Book Review: Antifragile
- Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
- Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
- ACX Grants Results
- ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
- Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
- 23
- ACX Grants Results 2025
Related Pages
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- COVID (5 shared issues)
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- Scott (5 shared issues)
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- India (4 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (3 shared issues)
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- AI (3 shared issues)
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- Bay Area (3 shared issues)
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- FDA (3 shared issues)
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- Germany (3 shared issues)
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- Substack (3 shared issues)
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- Trump (3 shared issues)
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- US (3 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
This is one reason (among many) Taleb disagrees so strongly with Steven Pinker's contention that war is declining. Pinker's data shows far fewer small wars, but does show that World Wars I and II were very large; he interprets the World Wars as outliers, and notes that since WWII the trend has been excellent. Taleb interprets the constant small wars that used to happen as "controlled burns", and the various institutions set up to prevent those wars - the Concert of Europe, multilateral alliances, the UN - as the same sort of dangerous volatility-buffering you get from a corporate job or a government bailout. It ensures fewer small wars - until the system gets overwhelmed, and you get a giant one. As long as NATO is intact, there's no risk of some dumb war between France and Britain over fishing rights; and as long as the Warsaw Pact is in place, there's no risk of Poland and Ukraine scuffling over borders. The cost is the risk of World War III between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
In Caliban’s War, the second book in The Expanse series, there’s an excellent metaphor for how having more smart people working on problems fails in an atmosphere of increased complexity, offered by fictional future UN government higher-up Chrisjen Avasarala: "You take part of a problem and you put it somewhere, get some people working on it, and then you get another part of the problem and get other people working on that. And pretty soon you have seven, eight, a hundred different little boxes with work going on, and no one talking to anyone because it would break security protocol." Except instead of security protocol, you could substitute any number of Moloch-y reasons, or just regular old-fashioned human tunnel vision. If there’s one thing we can take from the Prophets, it’s their focus on trying to understand complex systems holistically, Chesterton’s Fence style, instead of as piecemeal problem-boxes in a hundred siloed experts’ rooms. Each of today’s systems is more like Chesterton’s Maze of Forking Paths, where pulling out a brick here (say, trying to prioritize equity in vaccine distribution) leads to a catastrophic tunnel collapse there (more deaths, including in the historically underprivileged populations you were trying to save). The Prophets may have a less than stellar track record of questioning new technologies, but I think they’re right that the Wizardly tendency to reduce complexity to a discrete number of problem-boxes can only get us so far – and, as we saw with the myriad of expert box factories talking past each other in the global COVID pandemic response, it can harm as well as help. If we’re always hotfixing as our big picture grows bigger and more complex, we’re also always creating new inadvertent problems with our hotfixes, and are in ever more danger of forgetting about that one critical problem box until it’s too late.
...ion. Still, the Emergency ground on. One aspect the book doesn't stress, but which I was surprised to read about when Googling the period, was the forced sterilizations. Under pressure from the US and UN to control exponentially rising populations , Indira had started various population control efforts in the 60s, all ambiguously voluntary. Over time, the level of pressure ratcheted up, and during the Emergency th...
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
In the satire, the terrorists have WMDs courtesy of Kim Jong Un; in real life, Saddam had neither WMDs nor terrorist ties. International law allows the use of force either in self-defence or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The “legal” American military interventions include: The Korean War (1950-1953): UNSC declared a “breach of the peace” when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.