Having demonstrated yesterday that I tend to think more readily about how to do something than about who might have already done it, it's now occurred to me that this is actually something of a theme in terms of what I find interesting.

In computing, I'm a programmer rather than a sysadmin. One of the key differences between the two, it seems to me, is that a sysadmin has to be much more aware of the range of available software to do a job; they must know the pros and cons of the various options, and be able to determine the optimal choice to provide a given service in such a way as to strike the right balance between cost, reliability, speed and so on. A programmer, by contrast, is mostly dealing in the basic question of how to do something which either hasn't already been done or (for whatever reason) needs doing again. And one of the reasons why sysadmin attracts me much less than programming is simply that I find the latter much more interesting. I'm primarily interested in abstract questions of what can, or should, be done; the grubby details of what all the actual people in the actual world have done is of secondary interest to me.

This carries over without much change into other areas. A few years ago, for example, I had an opportunity to attend a talk on feminism, and I decided against it on the basis that it sounded likely to bore me rigid. The reason being, in terms of abstract moral philosophy and what should happen, feminism is pretty much a non-subject: you treat each person as a human being independently of sex except when there's a genuinely good reason for their sex to be relevant, and that's pretty much it. Everything else falls into the general area of how well the human race is currently doing at living up to that very simple principle, and/or how previous generations of the human race have made it unhelpfully difficult, and that's all much less interesting to me; once I've worked out what I should be doing, I simply do it to the best of my ability and move on to thinking about something else.

This morning I went to one of my company's regular marketing presentations, on the basis that I'd never actually been to one and I ought to at least have some idea of what went on in them. It turned out that a large part of the presentation centred around which other companies were doing stuff in a particular field, how much market share they had, what the differences were between what they were doing and what we were doing, and (to some extent) what we wanted to do about all this. And the same phenomenon turned out to apply: obsessively tracking what other people are doing is of very little interest to me compared to doing stuff myself. (Which is fine; I'm in the doing-stuff department, and the Marketing people are in the tracking-what-everyone-else-is-doing department, so they can get on with their jobs while I do mine and we'll communicate as necessary when the two interact.)

Of course, this isn't completely one-sided. I'm perfectly capable of being interested in what other people are doing if there's some reason why it's actually interesting: if it's a friend of mine doing it, or if it's something startling and new which I wouldn't have thought was possible, or if it's something whose results are important to me but which (for whatever reason) I'm not attempting myself, or no doubt many other reasons which I can't be bothered to list. But it seems to be generally the case, for me in particular, that ‘can’ and ‘should’ are of more intrinsic interest to me than ‘is’.