Theory of Change An Essay by Aaron Swartz www.aaronsw.com A theory of change is the opposite of a theory of action — it works backwards from the goal, in concrete steps, to figure out what you can do to achieve it. To develop a theory of change, you need to start at the end and repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?” changegoals
Making coal miners into programmers Many humans at present are not equipped to compete with machines—they are unable to do much more than routine jobs. There is a widespread belief (hope?) that humans can compete, once they are given proper training. However, I have long publicly doubted you could take many coal miners and make them into useful programmers. Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn Manual labor