I think you're missing the point people are trying to make: what matters is how people actually behave, not how they should behave. If the current design of smoke alarms causes people to disable them - irrespective of whether or not they should - then the design can be improved.
I'm not missing your point at all. People's behavior is reflected in the statistics regarding fire deaths and injuries as collated by the US Fire Administration.
It is collected solely for the purpose of saving lives by the very people who go into burning buildings and find the bodies. Claims on a website hawking smoke detectors as objects of desire are made for other purposes.
The statistics don't support the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms. And the Nest website doesn't back up their claims with data.
You assert that it's a binary choice between obnoxious false positives and life-saving potential, but this is because current smoke detector design is at a local maximum which optimizes for life-saving potential. There's absolutely no reason to think that a fundamental redesign of the smoke detector interface (rather than incremental improvements) can both be less obnoxious and equally life-saving.
As a concrete example, I've been trying to get a friend's parents to install (!) a smoke detector for /years/. They cook incredibly smoky food (lots of yogurt-marinated meats on a dry cast-iron pan) and both they and most of the other members of their immigrant community have removed any smoke detectors near their kitchen because the false positives are so onerous. If it were possible to provide them with a device which they could easily disable during cooking, they would be more protected for the rest of the time.
Additionally, the specific statistics you cite are not designed to determine whether people are disabling their smoke detectors due to false positives, and so have no bearing on that component of the discussion.
My $30 detectors purchased last year have this feature. Not the magic hand-waving part, but if you press the button, it becomes less sensitive for 30 minutes.
I don't see any statistics in the document you cited that are directly relevant to "the idea that people disable their smoke detectors permanently over nuisance alarms", in one way or another.
Indirectly (on p. 8 of the first document), it looks like 8% of fatal residential fires had smoke alarms that definitively "failed to operate". A much higher percentage are ambiguous, with it being unclear if the alarm operated or if there even was one in the first place. That is certainly compatible with the notion that people disable their smoke detectors because of the nuisance.
Someone else posted this elsewhere, but it's also relevant here. Statistics from the National Fire Protection Association support the idea that people disable their smoke detectors over nuisance alarms:
Smoke alarm failures usually result from missing, disconnected, or dead batteries. When smoke alarms should have operated but did not do so, it was usually because batteries are missing, disconnected or dead. People are most likely to remove or disconnect batteries because of nuisance activations. Sometimes the chirping to warn of a low battery is interpreted as a nuisance alarm.
