When I left academia in 2021 to join Oxford Ionics, not much changed day-to-day to start with. Despite significantly different goals and structure, life in a small-scale QC startup was just not that different from life in an academic lab. Sure, there were business goals to meet, and more engineering resources to utilise - but my brain was working in very much the same way it did at the university. That feeling was not to last.

As the scale of the operation grew, I found myself gradually departing further and further from the “academic mindset”. Fast forward to August 2025 - exactly 4 years into my startup journey - I feel I might have gotten to the other end of the spectrum, where I actually struggle quite a bit even to effectively communicate and collaborate with very academically-minded colleagues!

Now, I’m not saying this to brag. In fact, I’m not exactly thrilled about this total shift in perspective - in the end, academia is where most of my colleagues and collaborators come from, and I will have to course-correct my attitude going forward. Still, I am interested in introspecting on how my approach to “academic questions” evolved over time.

When discussing academia, we are always at a danger of over-generalising based on our individual domains, cultures, and experiences. From time to time, I discuss my misgivings about the university system with a friend who works in pure mathematics. Amusingly, to most of my complaints, he responds with “Oh, in maths it’s the exact opposite of everything you said”. However, I think there is one field of knowledge which we’re all familiar with, where we all suffer from the academic mindset of its top practitioners - a mindset that persisted over centuries and across cultures.

I’m talking, of course, about philosophy.

Philosophy’s journey into obscurity

As a teenager, I was actually quite obsessed with philosophy. I devoured writing from pre-Aristotelians to post-Hegelians, studying original texts as well as interpretations and history. I attended extracurricular classes, workshops with top teachers from my home city, as well as university lectures and seminars. I even got some medals in the national philosophy olympiad, much to the delight of my high school administration1. And then - just as I started being able to work with cutting-edge material - my interest evaporated. In the 15 years since, I probably have not read a single classic - and I have definitely not read any modern academic philosophy.

This was not a deliberate decision. I have never said “I’m done with this topic” - rather, no philosophy book has made it to the top of my to-read list. Only now I have the hindsight to look back and understand the root of my beef - the fact that, since its early days, philosophy evolved to be way, way waaaay too academic. What do I mean by that?

Philosophy is the subject seeking to answer questions like “what is the point of all this?” and “how can I be happy?”. These are the questions we all grapple with, in one way or another. Take a look at the NYT bestseller list right now - people all over the world are buying millions of books a year, every year, tackling those exact questions. Can you take a guess at how many of these bestsellers are written by academic philosophers?

The answer is, of course, “approximately none”. The reason is not that philosophy doesn’t care about these questions, but that - over hundreds of years - academic philosophers have moved away from answering broad questions of general interest in plain English (or rather plain Greek), to answering narrow questions that only two other people care about in technical jargon.

But… why? I think behind it all is relentless focus on novelty.

Philosophy as innovation gone too far

You see, when Western philosophy properly took off as an area of inquiry in ancient Greece, practical advice on how to live your life was its key focus. In subsequent centuries, giants of the field such as Seneca, Epicurus, or Mark Aurelius (for whom philosophy was a side-hustle to his 9-to-5 of running the Roman Empire) published foundational thoughts on how to deal with personal and professional problems, how to balance pleasure with obligations, and how individuals should interact with the wider society. A parallel development occurred in the East, with Buddha and Confucius spreading their teachings throughout Asia.

If you read any personal improvement book published in the 21st century, there is little there that can’t be traced back to these ancient thinkers - and that’s exactly the problem. To an academic philosopher, a book on, say, how to thrive in a modern workplace, simply adapts existing ideas to a modern context - and that’s not good enough for tenure. Likewise, many philosophy classics are not widely read simply because they’re not accessibly written - either because the author did not excel at crafting compelling narratives (likely), or because they crafted their stories for a different culture in a different age. This challenge allows Ryan Holiday to make millions of dollars from publishing a book of quotes from Stoic classics - but it would not allow an academic philosopher to make even a handful of citations, let alone positive reception from their colleagues. Thus, academic philosophers are forced to ignore the audience most interested in their work.

As a note: it is interesting how, when academic philosophers do write an occasional bestseller, it is usually in the context of recent technological or cultural developments, e.g. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence (concerning the rise of AI) or Toby Ord’s Precipice (concerning existential catastrophes). This makes sense: Plato couldn’t have been too concerned about self-improving LLMs, COVID-19 bioengineering, or nuclear submarines - thus, Bostrom and Ord can write content which is simultaneously novel and generally interesting. The question is, however, can academic philosophers continue to engage public imagination on the topic of AI in the coming decades, now that many of the foundational ideas have already been said?

Thus, while regular people continued to seek answers to timeless questions like “how to be a good parent” or “if someone is an asshole to me, can I be an asshole to them”, academic philosophers continued down the path of “is reality objectively real”, “is my red the same color as your red” etc. So when Heidegger (one of the 20th century’s most renowned philosophers) set out to discuss what makes us humans unique, it came out like this:

Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being—a relationship which itself is one of Being. And this means further that there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly. It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its Being, this Being is disclosed to it. Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological>

Does anyone wonder why Heidegger’s “Being and Time” is not particularly high on the bestseller list?

In summary, 3000 years of focus on novelty has moved philosophy from a deeply applied, broadly interesting discipline to an obscure, siloed, and abstract endeavour. If you’re a “regular human” interested in what philosophers have to say about your day-to-day struggles, you’re far better off seeking the teachings of ancient teachers like Gautama Buddha than talking to the ethics professor at your alma mater. And that is a real shame, isn’t it?

Progress is not just innovation

It is clear to me that - at least in this instance - the novelty constraint is not doing academia any favours, and I think we can all relate to the problem. Novelty feels like it should be a good thing - in the end, aren’t more ideas better than fewer ideas? However, there is a big difference between hearing an idea and internalising it. If you want to become a better person, you’re usually far better off simply meditating on timeless truths than seeking new ones. “New” is not always “better” - and it can, in fact, be worse.

Obviously, philosophy today is a bit of a caricature of an academic discipline. Still, thinking about philosophy as what happens when an academic debate continues unchecked for 3000 years clarifies my own feelings about physics and quantum computing quite a bit 2.

I think exploratory academic research is a beautiful thing and a powerful force of change. That’s what drew me to academia in the first place, and I remain charmed by this vision. However, as I get older, I intuitively understand better and better that “more innovation” does not always mean “more progress”.

Sometimes a field is stuck and needs fresh, wacky ideas - but other times, a field needs focus on applying existing ideas in practice, with out-of-the-box thinking acting as a distraction. And sometimes, a field is stuck not due to lack of ideas, but due to poor ability to disseminate the findings - and what it needs is amazing communicators and community builders.

Sometimes, all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and the high-hanging fruit is really too far out of reach. And other times, the problems tackled in a field are too niche to be even worth incrementally innovating on. In those situations, the best force of progress may be to give those topics a break.

In other words: the academic approach is great… but in only moderation.

  1. My understanding is that the official high-school rankings in Poland award a lot of points for subject olympiad medals, but that the formula awards both depth and width, i.e. it looks something like “number of points = (number of medals) x (number of disciplines)”. My school was very nerdy, with students always collecting lots of medals in mathematics, physics, and computer science - but rarely in humanities. By adding a medal in philosophy, I thus added a big fat multiplier to the score, allowing the school to jump to the top of the national rankings. ↩

  2. Even if, for some reason, you still enjoy reading papers on quantum foundations written 100 years after the birth of quantum mechanics - do you think 100 more years of innovative ideas on this topic are really going to help? ↩