Source Triangulation as a Discipline
Triangulation is not counting sources; it is counting independent sources, and those are far rarer than they look. Three articles citing one press release are one source in three coats, and their agreement verifies nothing. Real triangulation combines vantage points that fail in different ways, what a company says, what its filings disclose, what its customers report, what the physical evidence shows, so their errors partly cancel. When they converge, trust the view; when they diverge, you have found the most valuable signal there is, the spot where a story stops matching reality. Do not average conflicting sources; weight them by who is positioned to know and who has reason to shade. And run this as a standing loop, not a one-off: curate inputs, keep dated memory, hold open questions, and update honestly. The ecosystem is built to think for you. The skill is refusing to let it.
Knowledge check
You find the same striking statistic reported by three separate outlets. Why might this fail to constitute genuine triangulation, and what determines whether it does?
Show the answer
It fails if all three outlets trace back to the same original claim, such as one vendor study, because then you have one source in three coats and its bias is entirely uncancelled. Triangulation works only through independence of error: what matters is the number of independent sources arriving by different methods and vantage points, not the number of citations. You must walk each source back to its origin and collapse them to their true independent count before trusting the agreement.