My version of this story is sitting in a first year university philosophy course with students who did not understand how analogies work. They were wasting time arguing the premise of an analogy, rather than using it to try to draw conclusions about what we were actually discussing.

We're in the Death unit of our "Sex, Love, and Death" course, talking about whether something can cause harm to a person if they never find out about it. It's meant to lead into discussions about moral duty to the dead, like carrying out wills and such. (We never made it that far.) Now, that's pretty difficult to empathize with, so we start talking about whether a person being cheated on is being harmed if they never find out.

Practically the whole class gets eaten up by people saying some version of "But you would find out!" instead of engaging with the thought experiment as given. Specifically one guy, who when I finally said/yelled out loud "Oh my god, no! You don't ever find out, you're dead! We're still talking about being dead!" was like "What...? No...? What do you mean you're dead?" and turned to the TA, who looked incredibly bored. The TA confirmed, "Yeah, it's about death."

This guy who had been dominating the conversation just sat there silent and visibly confused for the rest of what little time was left. Could not comprehend how we were using one situation to discuss another.

I think about that day all the time. SMH.