I think almost everyone understands the benefits of both types and seat belts. The fact that a seat belt keeps you restrained during a crash is pretty intuitively obvious. The idiots who don't wear seat belts either (1) believe they'll beat the statistics, and thus no statistical argument will convince them or (2) value their "freedom" a lot more than they value their own lives.

In any case, though, wearing a seat belt or not is a choice one can make independently of all other factors. The cars come with seat belts, it's the same car either way. You click or not, nothing else changes about the car.

With types, however, that's not how it works. The tradeoff is... you may have to change your entire programming language, change your IDE, change your frameworks, rewrite existing code, etc. It's not analogous to seat belts at all. Do programmers want the compiler to catch mistakes? Of course they do, in an ideal world. Why wouldn't they? But there are a lot of tradeoffs here that don't exist in the case of seat belts.

Replace it with helmets if you want a more controversial option.

How do helmets change the argument?

Like seat belts, you can choose to wear or not wear a helmet independent of all other factors. The motorcycle or bicycle is exactly the same regardless of whether you're wearing a helmet. Also, everyone understands the benefits of a helmet. The benefits don't make everyone wear a helmet, but everyone is clear about why there are helmets.

It does, wearing helmets means you need to carry them around and store them, and it can ruin your hairstyle. People who can balance the tradeoffs make mostly reasonable decisions ("I write large programs with the support of a type system and eschew it for small scripts", "I will probably be OK without a helmet just biking slowly between two buildings at work") but some people will never accept the upsides as being worth it.

> some people will never accept the upsides as being worth it.

How is this any different from the selt belt case? "(1) believe they'll beat the statistics, and thus no statistical argument will convince them or (2) value their "freedom" a lot more than they value their own lives"

Would you really expect an article "The helmet is a biker's best friend" to convince them?

Everyone knows that a helmet helps prevent head injuries. That doesn't need to be explained. Whether the tradeoff of messing up your hair or whatever is worth it is up to the individual to decide, but there's nothing complex about the decision that needs an academic discussion.