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Emile comments on Folk grammar and morality - Less Wrong
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Actually, this is a point that I've wondered about for a while. Trolley problems rely on the Least Convenient Possible World constraint to force your decision. While this is great for helping you to investigate your intuitions, it's terrible for saving people from trolleys.
Maybe sometimes you need the guy who can make the cold, utilitarian call and choose who lives and who dies. But more often than not you want the guy who will actually try to think of a way to save everybody. I'd hate for someone to die on the tracks because the guy who could have saved him/her thought that derailing the trolley was cheating.
TLDR: Spending too much time on artificially constrained problems seems like it could optimize you away from being able to think in real-world situations.
I don't think spending time on artificially constrained will optimize you away from thinking the right way in real-world situations, just that it only develops one of the skills that is useful.
If you're preparing to row across the Atlantic Ocean, it's probably a bad idea to spend all your energy improving your upper-body strength; you should also learn a lot about weather, about nutrition and physiology, etc.