I like Schelling House because the name does real work.
On the plain read, it says what the place is for. In D.C., around AI, people don’t really know where to meet. The project is to build the place they can all coordinate around.
Then there’s the HPMOR/rationalist read, which is hilarious. If everyone inside the HPMOR universe is trying to guess the obvious meeting spot, and one of the options is called Schelling House, then yeah, obviously everyone goes there at noon on the day.
The name is dual-coded, which adds narrative complexity. It works for outsiders as a serious game theory reference, and it works for insiders as a rationalist myth-building exercise. Coincidentally, Lighthaven kind of did the same thing. It named the thing people needed: a Haven for the Light. Schelling House names our need: a house aimed at coordination problems.
So, some people on lw seem to be alergic to ribbonfarm, which is fine, except for when you need a little woo applied with your science and rationality. Thinking about this project took me back to Weaponized Sacredness by Sarah Perry, and I think it should be part of this discussion for multiple reasons.
First, she talks a lot about preference falsification, and what is currently happening on Capitol Hill around AI (described by John above) seems to involve a revealing of existing preference falsification.
Second, one possible name for what a lot of people are gesturing at in the comments is ‘the sacred’. For Perry it’s something like: sacredness is powerful because it binds groups together, but it also blinds them and can be weaponized against dissenters, heretics, insufficiently pious insiders, or people who say the wrong thing at the wrong time. If we combine this with Dr. John Vervaeke’s multidisciplinary work on the secular sacred, these could be high leverage frames to consider for this project. For Vervaeke, sacredness is a class of experiences where the world suddenly feels deeper than your current frame can hold, where ‘something’ becomes inexhaustibly meaningful. You can keep returning to the thing, and it keeps revealing more, forever. He connects this to “relevance realization”, the mind’s ability to notice what matters, what fits, what calls for attention, and what opens up new ways of seeing and acting. If Lighthaven is a reinvention of a monastery/cathedral, and this is our main model, we might want to talk about what is sacred for us collectively.
Third, egregores, if you know you know, the optimal amount of woo in science is not zero. I don’t think it’s a lot, but it’s not zero.