Coherence proves nothing because any set of facts can be explained coherently

A story that fits all the evidence feels like proof. It is not, because fit is cheap. R.V. Jones, the physicist who ran Britain's scientific intelligence in WWII, kept a foil to Occam's Razor that he called Crabtree's Bludgeon: no set of mutually inconsistent observations exists for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated. Hand a motivated mind any pile of contradictions and it will produce a narrative that swallows them all. Coherence is a property of the mind doing the explaining, not of the world being explained.

Heuer found the same failure at desk level decades later. Analysts satisfice: grab the first hypothesis that seems to fit, then stack up confirmation. And the confirmation does stack, because most evidence consistent with your hypothesis is also consistent with the rivals you never bothered to refute. The pile of supporting facts is real. It just isn't diagnostic.

So the test of an explanation is not how much it accommodates but what it forbids. A hypothesis that can absorb anything tells you nothing.

Source claim: Any evidence set admits a coherent explanation, so an explanation's fit with the evidence carries no weight on its own; only what it rules out does.