I want to advocate for Schelling Hall or Schelling Point as a potential name.
Thomas Schelling was a founding father of applied game theory and was a think-tank person deeply interested in saving the world from catastrophic (nuclear war) risk through careful analysis, maybe exactly the archetypal person you want in a DC “Lighthaven of the East” conference venue. He also worked on the Marshall Plan (economics, war) and the Copenhagen Consensus (climate change), suggesting a fairly high focus on important problems.
And of course, if you are not sure where to host an event, why not meet up at the Schelling Point?
As bonus points, Tom Schelling personally was born in Oakland and went to UC Berkeley before traveling to the East Coast and working there for pretty much the rest of his professional life, which echoes your desire to import a West Coast idea into the East Coast.
Claude independently came up with Schelling Point, with no priming from me. Pretty different reasons, too!
With that filter, my actual top pick:
The Schelling Point. A Schelling point is the focal solution people converge on without communicating — which is precisely what the venue is trying to become: the default place everyone just knows to meet. So the name describes the building’s literal function. But the deeper fit is the coalition test. Thomas Schelling was a DC defense intellectual — nuclear strategy, credible commitment, escalation, Arms and Influence — work that maps almost eerily onto AI governance, and that the Beltway establishment already reveres (Nobel laureate, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School). He’s also beloved in the rationalist community. He is one of vanishingly few names that signals “serious” to a Senate staffer and “ours” to a LessWronger simultaneously. That’s the whole game. The cost is that it’s a person’s name — but he’s a dead intellectual, not the donor, so it carries the right kind of authority rather than vanity.
If you want something that leans more civic and less in-jokey:
I want to advocate for Schelling Hall or Schelling Point as a potential name.
Thomas Schelling was a founding father of applied game theory and was a think-tank person deeply interested in saving the world from catastrophic (nuclear war) risk through careful analysis, maybe exactly the archetypal person you want in a DC “Lighthaven of the East” conference venue. He also worked on the Marshall Plan (economics, war) and the Copenhagen Consensus (climate change), suggesting a fairly high focus on important problems.
And of course, if you are not sure where to host an event, why not meet up at the Schelling Point?
As bonus points, Tom Schelling personally was born in Oakland and went to UC Berkeley before traveling to the East Coast and working there for pretty much the rest of his professional life, which echoes your desire to import a West Coast idea into the East Coast.
Claude independently came up with Schelling Point, with no priming from me. Pretty different reasons, too!
With that filter, my actual top pick:
The Schelling Point. A Schelling point is the focal solution people converge on without communicating — which is precisely what the venue is trying to become: the default place everyone just knows to meet. So the name describes the building’s literal function. But the deeper fit is the coalition test. Thomas Schelling was a DC defense intellectual — nuclear strategy, credible commitment, escalation, Arms and Influence — work that maps almost eerily onto AI governance, and that the Beltway establishment already reveres (Nobel laureate, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School). He’s also beloved in the rationalist community. He is one of vanishingly few names that signals “serious” to a Senate staffer and “ours” to a LessWronger simultaneously. That’s the whole game. The cost is that it’s a person’s name — but he’s a dead intellectual, not the donor, so it carries the right kind of authority rather than vanity.
If you want something that leans more civic and less in-jokey: