Source Triangulation
Confirming a technical claim from several independent sources of differing type, because most available material is marketing or an unrepresentative anecdote.
Technical research is dominated by two unreliable genres: vendor material, which is constructed to support a conclusion, and the single-company blog post, which describes what worked in conditions you do not share.
Triangulation means checking a claim against sources of different kinds, since sources of the same kind share the same biases.
The hierarchy worth knowing: primary documentation for what a system does; papers for why a design works and what it trades; engineering blogs from organisations operating at scale for operational reality, read with attention to their conditions; post-incident reports, which are the highest-signal material available because they describe failure honestly; practitioner communities for the problems that appear after adoption; and benchmarks, which should be assumed to favour whoever published them until reproduced on your own workload.
The specific questions to apply to any claim: at what scale and under what conditions was this true? What is the source's incentive? What is not being said — particularly the operational cost, which adoption stories reliably omit?
And the conclusion that follows: for anything consequential, a spike against your own workload beats any amount of reading, because the decisive difference is nearly always found in operating the thing rather than in evaluating it on paper.