It's not a pedantic difference; if you calculate the time as PST when it's PDT or vice versa you'll be an hour off. Holding a meeting an hour early or attending it an hour late can have serious consequences.
One way to look at pedantry is that it's when someone emphasizes technical correctness, even when another person's actual intent is understood.
If it's the middle of July, and someone in California sets up a meeting with someone in New York, but tells them "9am PST", it would be understood to actually mean "PT" or "PDT". I suspect only certain kinds of neurodivergent people would show up for the meeting an hour off. And hopefully someone who genuinely thought PST was the intention would ask for clarification. Most people, though, who would bring it up do so just for reasons of pedantry, not because they're actually confused.
This is really the same kind of reasoning as "most people know how tall five feet is" or "most people know that 'wicked' is a compliment" or "most people know that 0.59¢ per minute really means 59¢ per minute". It's obnoxious, back-slapping ethnocentrism masquerading as common sense.
Most people don't know how tall five feet is, because they use the metric system, and they don't even speak English. Most people in California and New York know those things, and they're also likely to know that you don't really mean "PST" if you're talking about a date when California is on daylight time.
But most people don't know those things, and so if what you say is the opposite of what you mean, you can expect them to be confused when they look up the definition. If that's what you're shooting for, then by all means, go right ahead. But if you're trying for clear communication, you might want to get a little bit clearer about the kinds of things "most people" know and the kinds of things most people actually know.
Daylight savings time transitions cause me scheduling grief on a regular basis, not because I'm "neurodivergent" but just because I don't know what dates Belgium or California or Chile does their stupid clock changes, because I don't live there, and they all do them on separate dates.
As mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32860778, timezone confusion led Scott Aaronson to miss an important meeting just today. The problem is real. (But no word on whether the cause was a daylight-time/standard-time mixup.)
Neurodivergent people, or people who aren't in California, which is actually more than 99% of people, and who therefore have to look up the timezone offset somehow.
It's probably true that the <1% of people you hang out with most of the time can correct the error without even thinking about it because they live in California too. But that doesn't make it a pedantic error; it's an error that regularly has serious consequences, precisely because people's actual intent is misunderstood.
It is a pedantic difference. While it's technically incorrect to say PST when it's currently PDT, it doesn't inhibit communication. Both parties will understand it to be that "we meeting at 9am, whenever that happens to be for our California staff" as opposed to "we are meeting at 9am PST, even though no one is currently on PST"
Even my colleague in Arizona is able to follow this despite them not joining the daylight savings time.
Technically incorrect but in a way that doesn't inhibit understanding is the definition of pedantic.
Fyi we ran into an actual real life example of this being a real problem since Arizona doesn't do daylight savings time it can cause miscommunication and people can miss meetings if you put the wrong S vs D. It's even worse when you consider some countries switch over at different times from S to D.
Edit
Sorry I missed the Arizona part of your comment but there are rare occasions where it can mislead people.
Yeah, I do think it's worth getting right. For the most part even those that know better but there is significant meaning there. I suspect it mostly wasn't a problem for our AZ person because the company essentially operated out of Chicago time, so in his case it was the difference between discussed times being 1 or 2 hours off.
I was just being pedantic about it being pedantic .
When someone sets up a meeting with me in a different time zone I'll google "what time is it in [timezone]?" then calculate the difference with my timezone and apply that the day of the meeting.
OP is calling it pedantic because most people mean PT. When someone says 9am they mean 9am regardless of the timezone, they’ll add the timezone if they’re talking with someone from a different timezone but still 99% of the time they mean 9am in their own timezone so if they’re in a region that observes dst even if they said pst they really meant pdt and you’re being pedantic by correcting them.
It's pedantic in the same sense that specifying 02022 rather than 2022 for the current year is.
In normal everyday usage, most of the time, people will understand by context and convention what is meant by "5:30" even without specifying AM or PM, let alone the timezone or TZDATA version associated. Yes, there are times specificity matters, and thinking about that can be goos, but the social frictions imposed may exceed any other benefits achieved, at least much of the time. At the same time, even where those ambiguities exist it's typically mentally jarring for people to be constantly reminded of this, even where they should be.
Where there's an opportunity for ambiguity, yes, nail down specifically what is meant. I read delecti's comment in that context, and note that they're describing themselves as the pedant. Which I interpret as "a stickler for accuracy and precision".
I agree that it's an important difference, but being insistent about it is excessive because functionally those kind of mistakes just don't happen when scheduling meetings in Outlook, which is the context where it matters.
Most of my work meetings only involve people in the same city, so there's no confusion there, and thus no scheduling problems. And 99% of the rest of my meetings are with people in Europe, and the relative difference between PST and CET is the same as the relative difference between PDT and CEST (though I do have to remind people twice a year that the two time zones change to/from DST a week or two apart).
