I remember taking a basic survival course when I was younger. The instructor took us outside to demonstrate a basic surveying technique called triangulation. The concept is simple, so if you are unfamiliar, let me explain. If you know the location of two points and the distance between them, then measure the angles from those points to a third object, you can calculate where that third object must be. If you have ever hiked in the wilderness, you will occasionally come across these brass survey markers. Surveyors used networks of these triangles to map enormous areas without physically measuring every distance. These markers formed the basis for establishing known distances.
Later in life, I bought a boat, one of the best and worst decisions I have made in life! However, I decided to take an online “captain” course because taking my boat out into the harbor was extremely intimidating for a newbie like me. That course had a section that was basically the same thing. A sailor might take bearings on two known landmarks, such as a lighthouse and a headland. Where those bearing lines intersect tells the sailor where the ship is. This is often called taking a fix or using cross bearings.
This basic principle is that of never trusting one source. So you can triangulate instead. If Source A says one thing, and source B says the same thing and then you find a thir source that also points in that same direction then you can draw some inference as to what reality might be. Where independent lines of evidence converge is your best estimate of reality.
The philosophical implication is that you cannot triangulate with only one point of reference. That may be one of the central problems with trying to determine truth from a single news source, expert, ideology, institution, or algorithm. Yet we do this all the time.
Just this morning, I saw a news flash that some famous actor was caught cheating on some famous actress. There was even a video showing the actor kissing another woman. The headline was pure clickbait, and no doubt generated a lot of that. I decided to read the comments, and in those comments I saw various stages of triangulation. Many people accepted this one source as absolute truth. Others looked at other sources but found conflicting information. Others questioned the validity and motivations of the original source altogether. If you had the patience to sort through the various comments, you finally determined the reality. This was completely fake. The picture was real, but it didn’t show the actor in question. After a few hours, they found the real person; although they looked similar to the actor, they were not the same person.
The new fun phrase people like to use today is “AI slop.” They will say, “Oh, that is AI slop,” or “That looks like AI slop.” The danger behind this thinking is that this is not triangulation. This is using your ability to make quick assessments, which your brain is really good at, but it can also be deceived. The test we use to determine if something is AI, called the Turing test, is designed to see if the system can fool another human into thinking that this is coming from another human and not a machine. So, using a quick dismissal like ” this is AI slop, is not a good solution. That will work for obviously poorly crafted material, but what about everything else?
The answer is that we are going to have to dust off the old textbooks, crack open the surveyor handbook, or nautical charts and learn how to triangulate as our default reaction. Accepting content, viewpoints, news, or other material from external sources at face value is simply no longer an option. We have to follow basic reasoning principles with everything we consume. We should have been doing that in the first place, but now more than ever, this is imperative lest we be led around by the nose.
