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Comment by tchaffee | Hacker News Reader

São Paulo is a city of over 12 million people, the largest city in the southern hemisphere of our planet, and is almost 10% of the Brazilian population. Almost everyone I meet with in SP is on time for work related meetings. I haven't noticed a difference between SP, the UK, the USA, or many of the other places I've worked. Generalizing about an entire country when that generalization is wrong for its biggest city makes for a good headline, but it's not responsible journalism.

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I am born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, and am very punctual. For business meetings most people don't come up late, but for social gatherings they almost always do. It's frustrating because it seems like I will never learn my lesson and always arrive punctually even if I don't intend to

This. People are conflating social mores with business practices.

São Paulo is a much more globalized city than Rio, which is really navel-gazing. (Most families in Rio can trace their ancestry centuries back, while São Paulo is usually the largest $(nationality-descent) population outside $(homecountry). This makes for cultural differences.)

But: it's not like carioca customs bleed over to the workplace any more than, say, West Texan customs do. I mean, at my workplace we wear suits but not ties; whenever in São Paulo we tie up. That's most of it.

> Almost everyone I meet with in SP is on time for work related meetings.

Is 'almost everyone you met' a representative sample of the population of SP? Of Brazil?

To say that Brazilians are late is a generalisation. To say they are on time is also a generalisation.

Can you show me I where said all Brazilians are on time? Or that even all people in SP are on time or that what I said was anything more than an opposing anecdote to the one presented in the article? I'm not a journalist and if I was I would certainly be looking for studies as opposed to anecdote. I'm simply pointing out bad journalism, and it doesn't require a representative sample in order to do that.

As you've written it, your desire to point out bad journalism is undermined by a lack of rigor on your part. You'd possibly be more effective if you didn't cite your personal experience.

The article is more about Rio than the rest of Brasil, and more about social rather than business gatherings. When I first started dating my (Carioca) wife, and was planning a birthday party for her at a restaurant, she warned me to send out a start time of 6:00 if I wanted people to actually start rolling in around 7-7:30. Sure enough, first guest arrived around 8:00. Not hard to get used to, just treat it like a different time zone.

Montreal is exactly the same way only you invite them for 10pm and the party only really starts at midnight.

also anecdotal claims are pretty irresponsible too: it's well documented that people are less punctual in warmer climates and in developing countries https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/67419

The article itself was anecdotal so refuting it only required an opposing anecdote. While I appreciate an actual study, I'd have to see something specific to São Paulo for it to be interesting or useful to me. I'm not going to come to any conclusions about a specific city based on a study so broad.

Also, the article summary you cited says nothing about punctuallity. It talks about pace of life. Where can I see the full study?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/43117638_The_Pace_o...

Thank you for the link. The study includes Rio, but not São Paulo, Brazil. I'm not sure why they would skip the largest city in the world that is both in a developing country and a warmer climate, but without including it, it's certainly not a very comprehensive study is it?

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