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:
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: