Great post. I also started writing mainly to clarify ideas, and there are a lot of ideas that when I complete them, I realize they aren't as good or useful as I suspected. Most of my writing on the internet has been an exercise in engaging directly with ideas, probably with only about an 80/20 distribution of weak to strong ones. I'm of the belief you only really understand as much as you can express clearly and communicate to others, and this means that to rationally disagree with someone, you need to be able to make their case with the depth and persuasiveness they have themselves.

Emotional reactions are what happen when we run out of the ability to reason abstractly about an idea according to its principles. If you don't go down the road of physically writing them out and reasoning them through, all you have is a second hand opinion about them, imo.