IMO, that's the perfect use of this thought experiment. In fact, I dare say if there are more examples like this, where laying out basic clear assumptions and following the model through its rules leads to an answer that is clearly wrong, then this example and those other examples of that type should probably make up a series of lectures in a course (or subsection thereof) on model use. It seems to me that plenty of people pick up on what models are and how to use them. It seems less people internalize, "All models are wrong. Some models are useful."
> The two capacitor paradox or capacitor paradox is a paradox, or counterintuitive thought experiment, in electric circuit theory.
> A paradox, also known as an antinomy, is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion.
(emphases mine). It's paradoxical in that it runs counter to expectations or intuition, using apparently valid reasoning. (Of course, maybe it doesn't run counter to your intuition; but that's how correct intuition is developed, by breaking naïve intuition against examples like this!) In fact, the article explicitly acknowledges this:
> Unlike some other paradoxes in science, this paradox is not due to the underlying physics, but to the limitations of the 'ideal circuit' conventions used in circuit theory.
However, I think my main point is still valid that this should not necessarily be called a paradox exactly because it differs a lot from how this term is commonly used in the naming of scientific thought experiments.
Perhaps it’s fair to say that all paradoxes are “just” part of a proof by contradiction and the only difference between ones that feel truly paradoxical and those that feel obvious is something subjective about a person’s understanding of the situation. Maybe it’s down to whether someone has enough of an understanding of the conceptual landscape to be able to actually recognize some of the problematic assumptions from the start of the problem statement or not, or maybe it’s something else, but either way I’m suspecting that it’s something subjective related to a person’s state of knowledge and/or approach to organizing their own knowledge.
- these which only contradict "common sense" intuitions/expectations but reality conforms to predictions of the theory instead of "common sense", and so these are usually called not real paradoxes like Pascal's hydrostatic paradox;
- these which show us limitations of the models we use to construct them, like two capacitor paradox or black hole information paradox;
- these true contradictions in the nature of reality which when you discover them the universe disappears in the puff of logic and you wake up as a student in the middle of the physics lecture, and that student was Albert Einstein.
A difference between model which we know how to adjust to make more realistic and one we don't know how is about history of physics and not physics itself.
It’s an apparent contradiction between our understanding of the meaning of the word and the actual usage of the word. The resolution of this paradox could be that there is widespread wrong usage of the word. Alternately it could be that our understanding of the meaning is wrong - which itself could be for multiple reasons. Perhaps our understanding of the definition is incomplete. Or it could be that the definition itself is simply wrong because it doesn’t reflect actual real-world usage.
Upon some reflection I think that a core part of the idea of a paradox is that there are many possible solutions to a problem and that some people, but almost certainly not all, will initially fail to even recognize the existence of solutions other than the one they expect, due to unconscious assumptions.
Naturally in many cases there will also be people who do not make those problematic assumptions to begin with, but that doesn’t on its own invalidate the use of the word “paradox” in that situation. The birthday paradox probably fits this definition just fine - ask anyone not trained in statistics about the subject and you’ll likely find a lot of people have unconscious assumptions that lead them to wrong answers, and in some cases thy will even be exceptionally confident in their wrong answers.
You might object to the “not trained in statistics” part but that objection itself would be circular - modern statistics education was designed with paradoxes like this in mind, specifically to lay down a foundation that doesn’t lead you down the wrong paths in cases like that. The solutions to the basic paradoxes of statistics are built into the way statistics is taught, just like the solutions to Godel’s and Russel’s and many others’ paradoxes are built into the foundations of any modern logical system.
It is a fate of any solved paradox. A paradox is a confusing paradox only to a point when you learn where the contradiction comes from, and how it does it, and how to avoid it.