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DanielVarga comments on Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life - Less Wrong
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Thought experiments aren't a replacement for real empiricism. They're a prerequisite for real empiricism.
"Intuitive mojo" is just calling a methodology you don't understand a mean name. However Einstein repeatedly hit success in his lifetime, presupposing that it is an ineffable mystery or a grand coincidence won't tell us much.
I already understand probability theory, and why it's important. I don't understand what you mean by "confirmation," how your earlier statement can be made sense of in quantitative terms, or why this notion should be treated as important here. So I'm asking you to explain the less clear term in terms of the more clear term.
Actually he did not. He got lucky early in his career, and pretty much coasted on that into irrelevance. His intuition allowed him to solve problems related to relativity, the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and a few other significant contributions within the span of a decade, early in his career. And then he went off the deep end following his intuition down a number of dead-ending rabbit holes for the rest of his life. He died in Princeton in 1955 having made no further significant contributions to physics after is 1916 invention of general relativity. Within the physics community (I am a trained physicist), Einstein's story is retold more often as a cautionary tale than a model to emulate.
There are worse fates than not being able to top your own discovery of general relativity.