Earplugs: imperfect, uncomfortable, annoying to "turn on and off" and gross. And, I suppose, that in many social contexts using them could end up causing you to be labeled a passive-agressive weirdo. Headphones are better in some ways and worse in others. I think they provide weaker isolation and require you to actually listen to music if you want to really stop hearing outside stuff but I never had high-end headphones so I don't actually know.

I'd pay for earlids, especially if they came with a shut-in-case-of-loud-noise reflex.

No, it doesn't. It would only sound that way if the claim were that deafness is better on net (as is claimed of mortality), rather than pointing out one particular benefit of being deaf.

(Minor nitpick: people labeled "deaf" can still pick up very low-frequency vibrations, and if they're next to a really wild party, can still get annoyed by the bass. Similarly, people with "no light perception" still get fried by lasers.)

These sound a lot like the rationalizations used to justify why death is a good thing.

Actually -- the senses we use to shape our map of the world in a very strong sense alter the ways in which we understand the world. It has long been demonstrated that in patients who lack a specific sense, the neural mass normally dedicated to that sense begins to "bleed over" into the remaining senses, giving them more 'processing power' than would otherwise normally be the case. What this, in turn, means is that the perceptual world of a deaf or blind person is very strongly different from the one that we who have all five senses would otherwise understand or know.

What does all of this imply? The deaf truly perceive the world in ways that we who have all of our senses cannot today comprehend, in any true sense -- though we can extrapolate from considering cases such as color-blindness; I can imagine that to a deaf person I am effectively color-blind to a whole range of visual depth that I can no more know than could a profoundly color-blind person 'know' the reality of red and green being profoundly separate colors.

In restoring hearing to such a person, if we are to truly argue that such a thing would be solely augmentative in nature, we should endeavor to ensure that such depth of perceptual capability was not lost in the process.

As a diagnosed autist, I very often wonder what it would be like to be what many of those of my condition refer to as "neurotypical". But I definitely would never want to live my life as 'one of you'; I am quite proud of the insights and demonstrably variant modes of thinking my condition has granted me.

As a transhumanist, I very often find that the notion of neurodiversity; of having the freedom to define for one's own self what one's cognitive processes should be shaped after, at any given time, is a more realizable near-term goal (morally, if not technically). It bypasses many of these problems.

Every net good policy has some bad consequences. Every net bad policy has some good consequences.

Deafness is not death. If you die, you can't do anything at all, because there isn't a you left to speak of.

If you cannot hear, but you can communicate linguistically, and you did not recently lose hearing in a traumatic fashion, your hedonic set-point incorporates that fact. Acquiring a sense of hearing if you don't have one already is non-trivial and often imperfect; it also does not make it easier to speak in a way others will react to normally (many hearing people listen to the voices of deaf people speaking aloud and subconsciously dehumanize or belittle them since their speech often sounds awkward to someone used to hearing/fluent speakers of their native language). So even then their problems don't go away, and social acceptance is not total.

Not the same thing as rationalizing death.

Neurally, this is true; they possess the same amount of gray matter dedicated to processing sensory input but it has fewer signals to work with. We who possess all five senses can do something similar by using sensory-deprivation tools to note the "sharpening" of a particular sense we pay attention to.

In terms of apparatus, however, simply being deaf doesn't suddenly eliminate near-sightedness.

Deaf people's disadvantage is an innate property of being deaf.

I disagree that there can be innate disadvantages, except for to the extent the utility function addresses those properties directly. See:

St Addahad's Symptoms. A small group of symptoms including fleshy growths, nerve clusters and neural pathways which result in a near permanent state of distraction as patterns of air pressure change are translated into thoughts and inserted into the mind with disruptively high priority. "Sounds" from all around, indoors and out, near and far, from nearby footsteps to distant thunderstorms or even one's own bodily functions all combine to make a state of prolonged focus nearly impossible to achieve, though this ability can be regained somewhat with practise.

As with many curses, St Addahad's sufferers describe benefits as well, such as being able to know things are happening without needing to see them, and to know which direction they are happening in, and some even report being able to balance without handholds. These trivial sounding benefits appear so addictive that most refuse to be treated. Efforts are underway to cause the onset of these symptoms by technological means, but there is debate on the moral issue of such experiments on humans as the necessary interventions cannot wait until the age of consent.

Can you explain why you believe that makes a moral difference?

No, what you are doing is confusing a claim of moral superiority with a claim of superior ability

I don't think I'm doing that. In the instrumental sense that "ceteris paribus, hearing people can do more than deaf people," it's also true that "ceteris paribus, white people can do more than black people (due to discrimination curtailing opportunities)." Both are purely instrumental claims, and both are fairly trivial in themselves. In the deaf case and in the racial case, all else is not equal. Otherwise, we'd want to specially encourage black parents to adopt white babies instead of conceiving. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusions, just pointing out that the reasons given are incomplete.