Trading off Lives

Taking your numbers at face value, you'd have 1.5 billion passenger hours afflicted by the ban per life saved, or about 3000 lifetimes worth of hours.

Or: if people spent every waking minute of their lives under annoying regulatory requirments about as bad as this one with the same tradeoffs, the benefit would be extending the average lifespan from 77.28 years to 77.29 years.

I expect most people would demand more like +10 years of lifespan in return for that level of restriction, not +0.01 years. So the cost benefit is probably off by ~3 orders of magnitude.

I generally prefer to think about this kind of tradeoff by scaling up the benefits to 1 life and then concentrating the costs in 1 life, and seeing how the tradeoff looks. That might be idiosyncratic, but to me it's very natural to ask my gut how much lifespan I'd like to trade off for a few minutes of pain or inconvenience.

I like the shift from comparing ideals (far-thinking) to concrete trade-offs people already do (near-thinking). 

[W]e could prohibit radios in cars because the music and adjustment can lead to collisions. Set the highway speed limit to 25mph. Ban cars entirely since they're more dangerous than walking and public transport. Require an N95 indoors at all times.

People often give examples like these to motivate the need to think about trade-offs between quantity and quality of life, but it's not obvious to me that these would actually decrease deaths on net.

I hear from drivers that music helps keep their mind active and focussed while driving / makes them less likely to zone out. A lower highway speed limit would slow down the economy and limit the distribution of goods, which is important for saving lives (one obvious example is medical goods, but you can think of others). Banning cars even more so. N95s do make it a bit harder to communicate with people and are a bit uncomfortable, it's not at all obvious to me that that leads to 0 deaths (both due to direct reduction of communication that ends up being important for saving lives, and also reduction in social ties leading to increased stress leading to more heart attacks, and also gyms basically don't exist any more so people don't exercise as much).

Anyway I'm sure there are interventions that really would decrease deaths (banning sugary drinks is a plausible example) that present a trade-off in quality of life. But it's interesting to me that examples people tend to give don't obviously meet the mark.

Imagine you were choosing between two potential ~10min car journeys: one being 6mi and one being 200ft shorter but you're not allowed to use your phone, read a book, listen to music, etc. I think nearly everyone would chose the extra 200ft, no?

If you mean "as a passenger", then sure. Otherwise I would totally pick the first one (even without the 200ft discount), since you are very much not supposed to do these things while driving.

Related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks [LW · GW] 

On the other side, there's the cost of ~10min of boredom, for every passenger, on every flight. Instead of playing games, watching movies, or reading, people would mostly be talking, looking out the window, or staring off into space.

Tangent: I'm not completely sure that this is actually a cost and not an unintended benefit