There is an unavoidable endgame as academic fields evolve: groups whose ideas have stopped generating cutting edge advancements have to go deeper into rhetoric

There is an unavoidable endgame as academic fields evolve: groups whose ideas have stopped generating cutting edge advancements have to go deeper into rhetoric to compensate, arguing that the cutting edge is actually what they were talking about all along. The need to constantly justify your existence distracts from using your methods to contribute to problems people care about, and your part of the field gets further behind.