I am not convinced by these kinds of calculations, and I think they generally do rationalists & their like a big disfavor.
A year of someone's life is approximately 9,000 hours.
If you spend an hour commuting to work and back for 30+ years, that's approximately the same amount of time.
But would anyone accept a magic genie offer where they agree to die a year earlier, in exchange for a magic ring that lets them teleport to work and back, skipping the commute? (Hand-waving away the various abuses of that sort of power; the genie is crafty, and will absolutely not allow you to metagame this sort of thing.)
I think not. Spending an hour waiting for, or on, a train is not the equivalent of losing an hour of your life.
This sounds like something a philosopher would say. I'm not a psychiatrist but individual and group psychology is more complicated. Most people tend to assume somebody else will take initiative. Also, you can show incontrovertible evidence to a crowd and they may still express apathy (e.g. the Kitty Genovese case).
For the curious, I recommend reading some recent reexaminations of the Kitty Genovese case. Most people's perception of it is as a demonstration of the bystander effect, but if you look more closely, that is not a very honest take of what happened. That angle however is something that shocks people and grabs attention, which makes it a very successful meme.
Rutget Bregman writes about this in his book Humankind, as well as other similar cases. Some snippets of it can be found online.
If it's expected/uninteresting for someone to hit the brake when someone shouts at them to do so, then is it not interesting to consider why the opposite happened in this case? ("I pointed to the person next to it and shouted [...] They didn't, so I ran down the train")
> You don't work out some complicated moral calculus.
Which I think is think is one of the author's points, that "morality problems often suggest a frame of mind where we have time to fully reason out the likely effects of each of our options" and that doesn't match reality.
I think a lot of people have been quietly traumatized by propaganda around authority and consequences. There's an unlimited amount of this content on social media platforms.
If you can't quickly run the min/max on consequences for pulling a subway emergency brake, you probably shouldn't be allowed to ride the subway without some kind of exception on file.