rationalskepticism.org

.....For starters, let’s consider Occam’s razor, first posited by 14th century philosopher William of Ockham, who said, in so many words, “Don’t overthink things, people.” When two or more competing theories are presented as an explanation for an idea, it is almost always the simplest one that is the answer.

The chatter over KIC 8462852 hardly abides by that dictum. If you’ve got a half a dozen natural scenarios that you reject as implausible and then an additional one that requires giant light-concentrating spacecraft built by aliens, and that’s the one passes your plausibility test, well, you might not have evaluated the probabilities as carefully as you should have. That’s not to say that the natural explanations don’t have problems—even perhaps fatal ones. Boyajian’s paper is a very well-reasoned piece of writing and she makes strong arguments. But she doesn’t firmly close the door on any of the natural scenarios, and she doesn’t even say that they represent an exhaustive list of the explanations....