We did some AI Safety tabling a while ago, and I wanted to share the resources we used.
I won't talk a lot about the strategy behind tabling as I want to keep this post short, and there are plenty of great materials already (see the EA Groups Resource Centre here, and write-ups here, here and here).
For context, we used the "voting" kind of approach outlined here, which is why we had colourful ping-pong balls and jars.
In short, people vote on the topic they think is most important, and then you have a conversation with them using one of the explainers. Due to limited space, we only gave 3 options to vote on. I think having 4-5 would be better, and you can kind of just reshuffle the explainers or add some of your own content.[1] Overall we think the session was well received, but I'm not sure about the value of tabling in general.
My guess is that its impact can be quite varied based on culture and location. From what I hear, it's quite useful to do at (elite) western universities, where fresher's fair is a thing. In other settings, including the ones that we tried, it's probably not the best use of time. On a related point, I think it's great if you can provide books as well, but I wouldn't give them out for free. Instead, you can lend books for a few months and ask for the person's email.[2]
You can see all the printable materials we used in this folder.
