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.
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.
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.