I spent a month in Cambridge after writing this and now think this post was a bit rash.

Cambridge may be more about ideas than anywhere else, but it also seemed home, more than anywhere else, to people doing scholarship for scholarship sake and to people who had subjugated significant ideas to serve their little ideas.

Again and again I ran into people studying great thinkers and great thoughts for no greater reason than that they had never been out of academia, didn't want to leave, and were using these thinkers and thoughts as fodder for their thesis (job application) in order to get a professorship that would shield them from the outside world forever.

Encountering those sickly sorts will leave any results oriented person, like Charlie, wary.