Some time back, I argued that if we want to really promote rationality, we need to get people to adopt rationality into a part of their identity.

That might just give you people who boom their favourite beliefs under the banner of Rationality without actually practicing the art or even having a clue about it. Elsewhere on the net, I notice that people who make a point of their intelligence, rationality, and clear thinking are usually trying to smuggle in some empirical claims about the world on the back of that, saying, not only is there this evidence, but I'm really smart so you should believe me and anyone who doesn't is Irrational and therefore Evil and Wrong.

See, for example, the history of Objectivism.

Perhaps the most striking effect of the teaching of the CoRT [Cognitive Research Trust] Thinking Lessons in school is a change in self-image. Before the use of the lessons there seem to be two self-images. The first one is "I am intelligent," which means that exams can be passed, the teacher's questions can be answered and school is a success area. The second one is "I am not intelligent" and school is a waste of time and lessons are boring. After the CoRT lessons there is a change to a single self-image: "I am a thinker." This is a constructive and positive image: "I am able to think about things, my ideas have value, I can listen to others." The "intelligent" or "not-intelligent" self-images are value images which must be defended. The "thinker" image is an operating image which is operated rather than defended. Note that the self-image of a thinker does not have to include the adjective "good."

-- Edward de Bono, De Bono's Thinking Course, p. 9

A more catchy label would help. "Rationalist" doesn't have the same simplicity and gradiosity as "truth-seeker", although it is more specific.

I got to think of one book that treats this topic: Ernest Gellner's Reason and Culture: The Historic Role of Rationality. Gellner says that Descartes, whom the takes to personify early European rationalism (a notion which he, like Less Wrong, uses in the broad sense which includes empiricism) saw reason and culture ("custom and example") as enemies. Now culture is very similar to "identity", but on a social level. The rationalist criticism's of culture and identity are also very similar: they criticize parts of culture/identity that you, or your society, has acquired for accidental reasons, which there is no rationale for, and which are damaging in some way.

Gellner's argument in the rest of the book is complex and I don't remember it in any detail, unfortunately. The reviews I find on the internet are less than informative. Some parts of the book are quite idiosyncratic, as Gellner often was, but he is always very stimulating to read (though reading him does require a decent level of knowledge of history and of the great sociologists and philosophers). I think I recall some line of argument that says that reason hasn't defeated culture, as Descartes wanted, but rather that our culture been transformed in a rationalist direction - it has come to put a high value on reason and rationalism (that's essentially what I say below, though I'd forgotten where I'd got it from). I don't have the book, though, so I can't veryify that I remember correctly.

Totally, and I think it's worth noting that intellectual/conceptual understanding of these biases doesn't necessarily translate into fixed behavior, even if the understanding is deeply internalized. In many cases, I suspect we'll need to be strategic and come up with 5-second-level behaviors that subvert the biases/heuristics, then install these (through identity and directly).

Very good. I think, in fact, that people - especially highly educated people - have adopted rationality into a part of their identity, even though they haven't done so to a nearly sufficiently high degree. Ever since the scientific revolution, people have become more and more willing to give rational arguments for their views.

This is just one way of many in which I think Less Wrong, CFAR etc do not constitute a break with what is here termed traditional rationality, but continuous with it. Sure, there are plenty of new and very interesting ideas developed here, but by and large, Less Wrong is a branch of the great rationalist tree. That's something to be proud of, in my view, because that tree is humanitiy's greatest achievement.

That said, I'm all for making people adopt rationality into a part of their identity to a higher degree. In fact, my present work in philosophy is partly concerned with strategies for making this happen. I'm sure there are many such strategies and they should be extensively studied.