It is worth noting that this often happens with scientific thought experiments too. Galileo’s intuition that light bodies fall as fast as heavy ones was vindicated by subsequent physics. But the verdict can also go the other way. For example, the assumption behind the Einstein’s argument against the completeness of quantum mechanics is nowadays rejected. But this certainly did not mean that his thought experiment was worthless. On the contrary, it led J. S. Bell to the derivation of the eponymous inequality whose experimental confirmation ruled out local hidden variable theories.