But we have to acknowledge that the weird philosophical thought experiment that can't possibly convince anyone except weird philosophers turned out to be convincing to other entities after all.

Compare the trolley problem, a famous thought experiment that people used to laugh at, up until a couple of years when suddenly important people began to ask important questions like "should we relax the safety standards for potentially life-saving vaccines" and "how much larger than Y does X need to be so that preventing X functionally illiterate children are worth the price of Y dead children"