Compare and contrast my intellectual activities

While thinking about this FI email by Elliot Temple, I decided to dedicate a blog post towards it. He said: "Summarize how the time period went." So I want to explore that. And I want to expand it to the entire period (including my past speedrunning and grammar sessions going back maybe a year).

My main goal has been to learn rationality. Part of that means to improve my self-evaluation methods, in general and specifically for individual activities.

Two of my activities have been speedrunning and grammar. My speedrunning sessions have been very helpful towards my main goal while my grammar sessions have not been of much help. (My latest grammar sessions have helped a little bit with my self-evaluation of grammar, but I don't think I've been able to generalize those ideas much for any activity.)

Then I recently started programming. I started programming only because I wanted to automate some repetitive tasks and because I find that kind of stuff very very very fun. But then very quickly I realized that this is helping me learn self-evaluation methods, not just for programming but for all activities. And I think my programming work has been more productive overall than compared to my speedrunning work, with respect to making progress towards my main goal (and the subgoal of developing my self-evaluation methods).

Why is my programming helping so much? I have some theories. 

First, programming is similar to speedrunning in the sense that it's very easy to know when you're wrong (assuming you already know how to do empirical tests in programming, which I do some). As for grammar, it's much more difficult to know when you're wrong.

Second, programming is similar to speedrunning in the sense that there's tons of helpful content already written on the internet. It is true that there's lots of content re grammar, but because it's much harder to know when you're wrong, much of that content is either wrong or confused or doesn't explain things well, making it non-ideal for my main goal (with my current skill level).

Third (and this hasn't taken effect yet), programming is similar to speedrunning in the sense that the philosophy community I'm involved with can make informed comments about my work (because many of them are programmers). My philosophy community can also help with critical discussions re grammar, but that type of discussion is much harder for me to understand given the complexity of the content (compared to speedrunning or programming).

So that sets programming and speedrunning on an equal playing field (for me, not claiming anything about other people, for example people who don't already know some programming).

Fourth, I'm able to do programming for many hours a day (on one particular day I spent ~7 hours) while I get bored speedrunning after just a few trials (which might take 20 minutes). So I'm putting a lot more time and thought into programming than I am into speedrunning.

I have another insight, differentiating between programming and speedrunning. Programming does not require fast reactions while speedrunning does. I think this is a pro and a con. One of my subgoals is to integrate my habits with my explicit policies, and another is to improve my skills at integrating my habits with my explicit policies. I think programming helps with this some but I'm guessing that speedrunning is better for this because it requires more focus on my habitual thinking and body movements.