People have a fairly strict limit on the kinds of counterfactuals they can conceive, and thus use as "measuring sticks" for evaluating the actual facts. Even the very imaginative still require a leg up in terms of being told, sometimes, being supplied with information, that what their mind had registered as constant was actually quite variable.

Ayn Rand didn't change her views. Period. She was just blatantly self-serving.

Most people do not support some Moral Ideal of Death. They just consider the actual dying bit inevitable. This is why they will change their minds once you show, in the real world, that it's changeable.