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That's silly. Of course you should make a judgment on the people you live with and whether they will steal from you or not. That is an example of a very useful judgment. Judging people on the TV is not useful.
Well, I would counter that forming assessments of people is a muscle, and if you don't use it, it might atrophy. That's the whole reason behind "learning from other people's mistakes" or "learning to recognise red flags": recognising that behaviour X is toxic and harmful in a person you don't know personally will make it easier to identify when someone you DO know starts exhibiting that behaviour. (Who knows, maybe there are people who started watching My 600 Lb Life for entirely base, ignoble reasons, but came away from it better equipped to spot warning signs of problem eating in their own friends and family.) If you only ever express judgements of people when being on the wrong side of a judgement call could have a severe negative impact on your life, but remain stubbornly agnostic at all other times, you run a severe risk of making the wrong judgement call when it really matters, or perhaps even failing to recognise that you're in a situation in which a judgement call is required. (Basically https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory and https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/09/constant-vigilance/)
Imagine two social workers, one who is extremely credulous and endlessly forgiving for all the bullshit excuses her junkie asshole clients offer her (after all, it doesn't affect her one way or the other); the other who sees through their bullshit instantly and tells them to get their shit together or she's cutting their social welfare. Which of these do you think is more likely to get ripped off when her own son gets into meth?
Or to use a less emotionally loaded example: imagine two employers, Alice and Bob, who make hiring decisions in their respective firms. Sometimes Alice's contacts in other firms will send her a CV and say "I'm thinking of hiring this candidate, what do you think of him?", and Alice always does her level best to provide an honest and fair assessment of the candidate's strengths and weaknesses according to their CV. The same thing happens to Bob, and he generally just tells the contact what he thinks they want to hear - after all, hiring decisions in another firm have no impact upon him personally. I would argue that Bob is far more likely to make a bad hiring decision in his own firm than Alice is, as by passing up valuable opportunities to assess candidates in other firms, his skill in this area will be more poorly honed than Alice's.
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