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HughRistik comments on The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It - Less Wrong
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Another reason the trolley problem is bogus is that if you were really in such a situation, you wouldn't be sure your attempt to push the guy onto the track would even succeed. What if he saw you coming and resisted? Pushing a lever with 100% of success is different from pushing a guy with 87% estimated success and consequences if you fail.
Yes, I think this is a serious problem. All the ways I can think of to give you a very high chance of shoving the guy off mean that you don't have to actually touch him, just (say) cut a rope, and that wouldn't just make it more likely you'd succeed but introduce a counfounding effect of making it slightly less personal for you.
This is in part because I don't really believe the explanation for non-shoving that says it has to do with not using people to an end; I think it's just squeamishness about shoving someone with your own hands who was right next to you. If you were dropping them onto the tracks from a great distance by pulling a lever, I think people would pull the lever a lot more often. I haven't tested this, of course.
Well if you fine-tune the conditions of a hypothetical dilemma too much, people will tend to go with a useful heuristic: they will call bullshit.