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inklesspen comments on The Strong Occam's Razor - Less Wrong
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I don't think that argument is even valid. After all, I have the option of putting a human in a box. If I do, one hypothesis states that the human will be tortured and then killed. The other hypothesis states that the human will "vanish"; it's not precisely clear what "vanish" means here, but I'm going to assume that since this state is supposed to be identical in my experience to the state in the first hypothesis, the human will no longer exist. (Alternative explanations, such as the human being transported to another universe which I can never reach, are even more outlandish.)
In either case, I am permanently removing a human from our society. On that basis alone, in the absence of more specific information, I choose not to take this option.
I think you will have to come up with a scenario where 'the action coupled with the more complicated explanation' is more attractive than both 'the action with the simpler explanation' and 'no action' in order to make this argument.
I don't think you're addressing the core of the argument. Even if you don't actually press the button, how much disutility you assign to pressing it depends on your beliefs. If you think the action will cause 50 years of torture, you're a believer in the "strong Occam's Razor" and the proof is complete.
A simple fix is to have the button-pressing also prevent, say, 45 years of observable torture. That gets you more complicated ethics, but that may be a sacrifice worth making to put the zero point between the two.