Danger of motivatiogenesis in interdisciplinary work

Randall Munroe has a nice old xkcd on citogenesis: the way factoids get created from bad checking of sources. You can see the comic at right. But let me summarize the process without direct reference to Wikipedia:

1. Somebody makes up a factoid and writes it somewhere without citation.
2. Another person then uses the factoid in passing in a more authoritative work, maybe sighting the point in 1 or not.
3. Further work inherits the citation from 2, without verifying its source, further enhancing the legitimacy of the factoid.
4. The cycle repeats.

Soon, everybody knows this factoid and yet there is no ground truth to back it up. I’m sure we can all think of some popular examples. Social media certainly seems to make this sort of loop easier.

We see this occasionally in science, too. Back in 2012, Daniel Lemire provided a nice example of this with algorithms research. But usually with science factoids, it eventually gets debuked with new experiments or proofs. Mostly because it can be professionally rewarding to show that a commonly assumed factoid is actually false.

But there is a similar effect in science that seems to me even more common, and much harder to correct: motivatiogenesis.

Motivatiogenesis can be especially easy to fall into with interdisiplinary work. Especially if we don’t challenge ourselves to produce work that is an advance in both (and not just one) of the fields we’re bridging.