Media Literacy Challenge #3: Knowing your limits

The Nomadic Blog

Notes and reflections on history and education

Nate Noorlander
February 24, 2026

This post is part of The Nomadic Professor’s 2026 Media Literacy Challenge: Read Smarter Online! Twice a month throughout 2026, America’s 250th anniversary year, we’re sharing one small skill to help you read better online—social media, YouTube, podcasts, newsletters, forums, magazines, journals, newspapers, and everything between. Follow along or join and enter the drawing to win free courses or Amazon gift cards—including a grand prize of lifetime access to all Nomadic Professor courses, or a $500 Amazon gift card. Learn more here.

To be literate with the media, we have to be honest about our own limits and vulnerabilities.

Perhaps we spend too much time pointlessly confusing ourselves with random bits of information from strangers.

Or we’re unduly influenced by emotional language and images.

Perhaps we’re easily flattered.

Or we’re only motivated to find support for what we already think.

Maybe we’re cynical about everyone with expertise, or, conversely, have too much confidence in our own small information networks.

Maybe we’re too certain too quickly about too many things.

This list of limits and vulnerabilities could go on for a long time.

Today I want to invite you to briefly research one of three different problem areas for the person aspiring to be literate with the media:

Circumstantial reasoning
Trust in institutions vs. trust in your own research
Attention opportunity cost

Each of these has their own related sub-topics that sort of overlap and bring out different nuances of what we’re using them to mean in this context. You can see those overlapping concepts in the attached handout.

For example, when I say “circumstantial evidence” in this context, I’m referring to the tendency to see patterns and connections and arrive at conclusions that aren’t strongly supported by the evidence. This is very common, in big ways and small. Perhaps it’s a kind of built-in vulnerability to how we tend to think—we like to see patterns, we like to have answers, we like to feel “in the know,” we like to expose hidden things, and we’re uncomfortable with uncertainty and randomness. Hence the guiding question for this content in our Media Literacy course: Do you know your limits? Are you aware of when your reasoning is faulty and prone to error?

Say your friend doesn’t answer your call two times in a row, and then you see an Instagram post of another friend at a movie, and you connect the dots: they went to the movie together, and they didn’t invite you on purpose.

Or say there was a robbery in your neighborhood. Ten minutes before the robbery your Ring camera caught your next-door neighbor walking their dog in the direction of the robbed house. Therefore your neighbor is guilty.

Or say the election results for the newly elected governor of your state are unusually lopsided only one year after that candidate, when she was still just a state legislator, just happened to support a bill that ended up making it much harder for a huge swathe of her opposing political party to cast their ballots in time. Therefore, the new governor is part of a long-term conspiracy to undermine democracy in pursuit of personal power.

In all of these cases, without further evidence it requires a significant amount of ignoring unknowns or filling in blanks with assumptions before you can arrive at the stated conclusions. That’s not to say that the conclusions are false, only to say that there’s not yet enough evidence to support them, therefore you should withhold judgment until the evidence is more conclusive. If it’s never conclusive, you likely don’t need to have a strong opinion.

So here’s the challenge:

Research one of these three concepts—or all three if you choose!—pay attention to the way you react to new information over the next 48 hours, and report back on your experience with that concept: Were you susceptible to bad reasoning or bad behavior with respect to your concept? Did you see it in others?

I hope to hear from you. Enjoy!

Media Literacy Challenge 2026 – Skill #3: Know your limits

Definitions

circumstantial evidence / reasoning:

evidence or reasoning that relies on making an inference to connect it to the fact in question; contrasted with “direct evidence,” which does not require an inference since it supports the fact directly; e.g., “he was in the area at the time so he probably did it” vs. “the camera was rolling so we saw him do it”; circumstantial evidence tends to be alluring since the inference seems justified when it fits other facts, but it’s “circumstantial” because it could be explained in other ways, so best practice is to be circumspect in the way we use it

“do your own research”:

the tendency to comprehensively mistrust mainstream institutions, authority figures, and old-school gatekeepers—from the CDC to the UN, from cops to professors, from doctors to corporations, from journalists to other experts, especially those with an opposing political bent; one side of what we might call a “credulity / cynicism spectrum”

credulity:

the tendency to believe quickly and without reflection; everyone is basically honest

cynicism:

the tendency to disbelieve quickly and without reflection; people always have hidden motives

attention opportunity cost:

attention is zero-sum; i.e., when your attention is engaged in one thing, it is necessarily not engaged in another thing; the thing it’s not engaged in is the cost or the price of the thing it is engaged in; e.g., if I’m paying attention to my computer, the cost of that attention is other opportunities for my attention at that moment, such as my dog, or my broken fridge, or my half-finished book; if I’m paying a lot of attention to social media, I necessarily have less attention to give to work or school or recreation, etc.

Downloadables:

12 Responses

Wanda W says:

February 26, 2026 at 5:29 am

3. Attention Opportunity Cost
I was taught that one civic responsibility of any US citizen 18 or older is to vote. In order to vote responsibly one must be informed. The USA is involved in and impacted by global economic interdependence. The national and political security of other countries impact the national security of the USA and vice versa. For these reasons one must be knowledgeable about international events. To vote in national elections one must be aware of nationwide events and the major players involved in said events. The same principle holds true on a state and local basis. That’s a lot to keep up with. During the term of the 45th President of the United States (POTUS) I was on information overload. His frequent postings to social media caused near daily recurrence of PTSD symptoms. I was afraid of missing something important so I was employing neither strategic ignorance nor information triaging. Consequently, my information diet consisted of too many sources on the same news item. If Source A reported on a story, maybe Source B or Source C had additional facts on the same story. I felt a desperation to know all the facts of every story. I was not engaging in lateral reading, just scooping up everything I could get, more or less regardless of the source. However, the cognitive load of all this caused me to neglect self-care resulting in inattentional blindness to too many things going on in my life.
During the term of the 46th POTUS, I was much calmer and my information diet became more reasonable. The assignment was to observe these sorts of things for two days and evaluate their presence or absence of these behaviors in your life. It was while I was doing this that I realized that now, during the reign of the 47th POTUS, I am back to where I was during the term of the 45th POTUS, albeit at a more extreme level than I was even back then. I need to be more aware of attention economy. My attention is a limited resource and news consumption was usurping too much of this resource. I think that attention is a zero sum entity. If my attention to news increases, then necessarily my attention to other things, my new puppy, self-care, other responsibilities must go down.
During the two days of my observation The State of the Union was broadcast. I made the decision that I did not need to watch it. News outlets would report on any key statements that might be important. I have realized that many instances of reporting start out with a statement or two about what happened, then the reported alone, or with others, discuss their opinions and interpretation of what it means. At that point I will stop listening. If I am presented a fact such as the Supreme Court handed down a decision stating X, that’s what I need to know. I don’t need to know what some reported thinks the impact of that might be, I can think about it myself, about what I think the impact of that might be. I can use the time saved to check another story on another topic. CNN has a service where they will send you, each morning, Five Things You Need to Know. I don’t really care for CNN imposing what they think I need to know on me. However, I can utilize some strategic ignorance and limit myself to, for example, five things I need to know, nationally, on a daily basis, if it is not the same five things every day, I think I can remain abreast of most of the nationally important things going on. I think I already have my consumption of international, state, and local news under control. This was an eye-opening assignment for me.

Reply
Nate Noorlander says:

February 26, 2026 at 6:14 am

Thank you Wanda! You hit so many important points and topical vocab terms. The recognition that attention is zero-sum is pretty profound and potentially paradigm shifting. It sets up an immediate filter that allows one to make pretty easy value judgments, even moment to moment. So grateful you’re engaging in this with us!

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Courtney Collins says:

February 26, 2026 at 8:28 am

Regarding attention opportunity cost: I have noticed over the past few months how the amount I engage with online media has an inverse relationship to the quality of the time I spend with the people in my home. Not only do I spend less time talking with them, my mood is probably worse when I’ve spent a lot of time online. Something I see online can impact the direction of my thoughts long after seeing the content.

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Brenna says:

February 26, 2026 at 10:15 am

I chose to focus on trust in institutions vs self research. I knew that I tend to lean more cynical, but after paying more attention the past few days, I noticed I am cynical for sources that don’t match my beliefs, but I am probably too easily swayed and believing of the things that match my beliefs.

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1. NateNoor says:
  
  February 27, 2026 at 9:42 am
  
  Such an important thing to recognize. It’s hard to tell when we’re just patting ourselves on the back for something we already believed or wanted to be true, when we’re being credulous, cynical, or merely partisan, and when we’re genuinely open to persuasion, or genuinely fair in our assessment of the evidence. Exhausting!
  
  Reply
Kortney Garrison says:

February 26, 2026 at 11:32 am

We were studying Serusier’s painting, Melancholia. If you do a simple image search, you can see a wide range of colors. For a Symbolist painter color is very important. But it’s hard to get a real sense of the color pallette from these images.

Additionally, the painting is called both Melancholia and Breton Ève. There are very different connotations with each title. Again, the Symbolists love the wider ripples of meaning with mythology. But many times online the painting is called Breton Eve, without the accent mark it would have in French. In English Eve can refer to Eve, the biblical character, or eve, as in evening.

It’s crazy that it’s hard to get a read on what a painting is called or looks like. It’s a real, physical object. It would seem that there’s not a lot of room for ideologically based interpretation. And yet, we had to dig and question and think our way through the problem.

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Emily D. says:

February 26, 2026 at 2:53 pm

I am very susceptible to circumstantial reasoning, usually it is fairly innocent, almost like story telling or a way to reason out minor inconveniences and excuse human flaws, it allows me to mentally move on and are quickly forgotten. But now that I have had to think about it, I notice I do it with bigger issues to reason away things I don’t want to deal with or don’t fit in my view. It is a lot of assumptions that I add up to equal what I want. When getting news, I discovered it is useful to pinpoint what they want me to conclude, which allows me space to step back and consider what facts are missing, glossed over or are weighted by perspective. This was a very helpful exercise.
My favorite and probably most actionable part of this post is, “If it’s never conclusive, you likely don’t need to have a strong opinion.” That right there is advice to live by for a more peaceful existence.

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1. Nate Noorlander says:
  
  February 27, 2026 at 9:45 am
  
  Very nice. It takes a lot of work to recognize when we’re not being impartial, but instead reasoning backwards from the conclusions we’ve already arrived at, or passionately want to be true. Your exercise sounds really helpful.
  
  Reply
Hyrum Petersen says:

February 26, 2026 at 4:16 pm

Some people will believe what anyone says about something, even if they are not an expert in that field, which is obviously not a very good way to go. You wouldn’t call an auto repair person to fix your dishwasher, or a piano repair person to fix your sink, you would go to the correct people who know how to fix the things that need fixing. The same should go for where we get out information, we need to go to the correct sources for our information, but still take it with a grain or two of salt, because it’s still possible they are wrong.

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Nate Noorlander says:

February 27, 2026 at 9:48 am

Good analogy—I agree that the internet makes it seem a little too easy to be an expert in everything. If you compare abstract or cognitive skills and training to physical skills like working on a car or plumbing a house it’s a little easier to see why experts are valuable even when the internet allows us to double-check their claims.

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Julie Hanauer says:

February 27, 2026 at 4:34 pm

Thank you for this challenge. I chose to focus on the credulity / cynicism spectrum because I have been on a journey out of long-term thinking patterns I want to change – most of all, trusting a person/institution. I’ve found myself vacillating between credulity and cynicism, catching myself, and feeling frustrated. I am trying to look at things more objectively, going to find evidence where needed, and letting the other things go. I don’t need to have an opinion about everything.

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Camille P says:

February 27, 2026 at 10:13 pm

Attention opportunity cost is something I am becoming increasingly aware of. There are so many things competing for my attention and I find the algorithms do an excellent job pushing things that are interesting to me, but I simply do not have time to absorb all the information that is promoted or provided. For example, I have a “junk email” address that I use for newsletters and companies I suspect will spam me, or for companies I shop at and want to find their sales fliers on occasion, but not have ever present. I have found over the past few months that I check it very infrequently, and rely on the AI sorting function to determine which emails are of Primary importance. Even in my regular email inboxes, I have a bad habit of leaving something half read or simply marked unread because it looks like it has good information, that I think I should come back to. And then time goes on and the importance of going through this information decreases, such that I end up not ever getting back to these emails.

The cost of where I place my attention costs me the opportunity of absorbing cool and interesting information that I otherwise would spend time on, but time is a finite resource. I need to prioritize and be aware of putting the most important things first, not just the flashy or catchy, or urgent things first, as they may push to exclusion the more important things.

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