That is the general approach I've been taking on the issue so far- basically I'm interested in learning about consciousness, and I've been going about it by reading papers on the subject.

However, part of the issue that I have is that I don't know what I don't know. I can look up terms that I don't know that show up in papers, but in the literature there are presumably unspoken inferences being made based on "obvious" information.

Furthermore, since I have a bias toward novelty or flashiness, I may miss things that blatantly and obviously contradict results that any well-trained neuroscientist or cognitive scientist should know and end up believing something that couldn't be true.

Do you have recommendations for places where non-experts can ask more knowledgeable people about neuro/cog sci? There exists a cognitive sciences stack exchange, but it appears to be poorly trafficked- there's an average of about one posting per week.