“It turns out” (2010)
jsomers.net

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207 points

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Munksgaard

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7 hours ago

75 comments

gwd ・ 7 hours ago

This was pointed out humorously by Douglas Adams:

> "..am I alone in finding the expression 'it turns out' to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It's great. It's hugely better than its predecessors 'I read somewhere that...' or the craven 'they say that...' because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it's research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight."

  • SunshineTheCat ・ 5 minutes ago

    It kinda reminds me of replying to a statement with "So...it's come to this..."

    My friends and I use to do this all the time for no particular reason except to turn an otherwise ordinary conversation into challenge that can only be resolved by mortal combat.

    Of course, we did it jokingly with each other. But when someone we didn't know heard us do this they were genuinely confused with what we were so offended by, which was half the fun.

  • turnsout ・ 6 hours ago

    Turns out I was onto something

    • DetroitThrow ・ 6 hours ago

      "It Turns Out" (2010)

      user?id=turnsout (2020)

      • bryanrasmussen ・ 5 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        Id Turns Out? There's 16 numbers from d to t, counting t. 2010 + 16. OMG Turns out they were on to something!

        • rmellow ・ 2 hours ago

          I think y'all are on something.

  • thom ・ 6 hours ago

    When I saw this title on HN, I immediately thought it was going to be about The Salmon of Doubt.

wongarsu ・ 6 hours ago

There is however another very powerful aspect of the phrase: it suggests that something is not obvious. This makes it very powerful when correcting someone without making them feel like they said something stupid. "The sun is yellow" "You'd think that. But it turns out that without the atmosphere the sun is actually a blueish white, and high on the sky it's a neutral white"

  • Modified3019 ・ 4 hours ago

    That’s exactly how I try to use the phrase, usually when pushing back against falsified ideas I likely accepted to some degree myself and later looked into. Like the whole thing with alpha/beta male wolf mythology vs real observation in the wild.

    Incidentally, just yesterday I learned the sun is “white”, because I was looking at why veins are bluish (despite low oxygen blood actually being just dark red) and looking into light scattering effects that are the cause.

  • ErroneousBosh ・ an hour ago

    There's a collection of Ben Goldacre's articles compiled in a book called "I Think You'll Find It's A Bit More Complicated Than That", which is a phrase I want to put on a T-shirt, or possibly my Teams background at work.

  • yegle ・ 6 hours ago

    I don't see the example would be different in conveying the same meaning if you omit the whole "85 turns out that".

    • dack ・ 6 hours ago

      if you include "it turns out that", you're implying that maybe you thought the same as them in the past, but looked into it, and learned something interesting. if you omit that, you're just correcting them and subtly implying that they aren't as smart as you (e.g. it was obvious to you)

jonahx ・ 6 hours ago

Interesting rebuttal written by a HN reader when the original was published and made it to the front page in 2010:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100309032112/http://blog.ethan...

  • tptacek ・ 5 hours ago

    I'd argue the most interesting part of this piece isn't what it says about Paul Graham, but rather the observation it makes about writing. I think about "It Turns Out" all the time, and it's virtually never because I'm in that moment caring about something Graham wrote.

    • jonahx ・ 4 hours ago

      I agree. I like the original piece Sommers wrote, as did the rebuttal author. I think the insight about "it turns out" has merit whether or not it works as a pg takedown. Nevertheless I also enjoyed the nothing-but-receipts rebuttal.

  • vanschelven ・ 6 hours ago

    The rebuttal is especially interesting because it simply let's the actual usages of the term speak for themselves. It turns out (ha!) that the Cambridge example is the only case that supports the OPs case.

jakub_g ・ 43 minutes ago

Semi-related, something that kind of irritates me is the usage of "as" in online newspapers headlines:

   "$Something-is-happening as $Something-else-is-happening"
It's usually written in a way that might be suggesting a direct link between the two things to a layman, but often there's none, other than the fact those two things are happening around the same time.

This can be disorienting when the reader is not familiar with the subject discussed, and lead them to wrong conclusions.

kryptiskt ・ 6 hours ago

One good use of "It turns out..." is to report negative results. Something like "You can overclock a Mac Mini to 8GHz using liquid nitrogen. It turns out this is not a stable configuration <picture of burning Mac Mini hooked up to a physics experiment>"

jrm4 ・ 4 hours ago

Haven't seen anyone else mention the following - but it more or less fulfills the same connotative role as the passive voice, no? Takes focus off the agency of -- well, the speaker, but actually anyone?

SoftTalker ・ 2 hours ago

It turns out that "It turns out" is just another overused corpspeak cliche that sounds important and thoughtful on the surface but actually betrays a low-effort level of writing.

loevborg ・ 6 hours ago

I'm a big Rich Hickey fan. He's a big user of a (to me) peculiar variant of the phrase, "it ends up": a total of 144 times in https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts

It also struck me as a bit of a sleight of hand - but maybe it's just rhetorical flourish. Or more charitably you could say it's inevitable - in a conference talk of finite length, you can't possibly back up every assertion with detailed evidence. "It turns out" or "it ends up" are then a shorthand way of referring to your own experience.

  • loevborg ・ 6 hours ago

    PS all 17 hits for "it turns out" in the repository are from other speakers.

cristoperb ・ 6 hours ago

This is a nitpick, but since this essay is over 15 years old now I don't think the author will mind. This phrase always rankles me:

> Let me explain what I mean.

It turns out that if you're writing an essay or a youtube script you don't have to tell me that you're going to explain something to me before you explain it to me. I guess it acts as a "hack" to try to impart some gravity to what follows without actually having to write a convincing introduction, but unlike "it turns out" it can almost always just be deleted to improve the flow.

  • pmichaud ・ 5 hours ago

    I think it's more like a sign post in the text. At the start of any paragraph (or sentence, really) the text may go literally anywhere--could be a new thought, a continuation of an implicit list, an explanation of what came previous, or anything else.

    If you say something weird or apparently unsupported, the savvy reader at that very moment is going to be thinking so. So it's helpful to orient them like:

    > Here's a wild sentence. Here's why it's not actually that wild: reasons

    Without the connecting phrase, the reader has to figure out from context that out of all the possible things the following text could be doing, what it's actually doing is explaining the previous claim.

    You can rightly counterpoint that it's not strictly necessary, that a savvy reader can figure it out. But I think the moment right after a wild statement is a hotspot for readers getting ready to jettison, and having a little assurance is likely very helpful.

  • keyringlight ・ 5 hours ago

    Language is filled with those types of phrases, the one which bugs me once it was pointed out (even though I use it myself) is "to be honest...", which could carry the implication anything said without that qualifier may be dishonest. What including those phrases seem to come down to is an informal style, a bit more acceptable in a spoken conversation but for written it probably depends on the audience.

    Something I'd wonder about is if usage of it has changed based on the medium people use over the years, whether that's in-person, telephone, writing letters, or computer/smartphone writing. Has using computers for short form conversations allowed conversational phrases to bleed into formal writing.

    • pvillano ・ 3 hours ago

      If the literal meaning doesn't make sense, derive the meaning from the way it is used.

      "To be honest" typically means "Here is an opinion that I'm embarrassed to share, and would rather lie about"

      They're not lying about everything else, they're lying about that one thing, every other time.

      e.g. "I tell people my favorite movie is 'The Godfather', but, to be honest, it's actually Ratatouille"

    • quectophoton ・ 5 hours ago

      > Language is filled with those types of phrases, the one which bugs me once it was pointed out (even though I use it myself) is "to be honest...", which could carry the implication anything said without that qualifier may be dishonest.

      Supernatural highlights this on S1E08, at 27:28. Dean was talking with someone and starts saying "the truth is" but the other person instantly cuts him off saying "you know who starts their sentences with 'the truth is'? Liars".

  • beezlewax ・ 6 hours ago

    You also explained what you were going to explain here

    • cristoperb ・ 6 hours ago

      I guess it's not prefatory remarks or disclaimers that I find so grating, but the explicit "I'll explain" (or worse, faux conversational "May I explain?" "Let me explain") followed immediately by the explanation.

  • thwarted ・ 5 hours ago

    > It turns out that if you're writing an essay or a youtube script you don't have to tell me that you're going to explain something to me before you explain it to me.

    I do if I'm looking to pad the essay or video to make it longer.

  • sonofhans ・ 5 hours ago

    Reminds me of Mark Twain’s advice to writers, “Any time you want to write ‘very’ write ‘damn’ instead so your editor will remove it.”

  • travisjungroth ・ 5 hours ago

    That jumped out to me because you see it in YouTube videos so much now. I was surprised at the age of this post.

  • projektfu ・ 5 hours ago

    If you're writing a YouTube script, just, stop. They're so tiresome.

    • maest ・ 5 hours ago

      I enjoy longform yt essays. Many others do too, based on view counts

NicolasCornwall ・ 7 hours ago

Check the YouTube video Plagiarism and You(Tube) from hbomberguy where he addresses his infatuation with this phrase

I turns out that it's also a phrase which gets stuck on some peoples mind easily

  • amiga386 ・ 6 hours ago

    For those that don't have 4 hours to spare: https://youtu.be/yDp3cB5fHXQ?t=2339

    > But it turns out writing a good review is really difficult. For example, I use the phrase "it turns out" more than once every video by accident because I'm bad at it. I'm not even joking. I've written "it turns out" in the next section without realizing it. That's how fuckin' bad I am.

    > Being able to write a good review is a unique and difficult skill. Creative people often have trouble recognizing their skills as skills because eventually they feel like second nature, and they don't feel real and practical like building a house or domming. But it turns ...in... that this stuff actually is valuable. If it wasn't, people wouldn't be stealing it.

btown ・ 5 hours ago

> Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter - as though the situation simply unfolded that way.

This reminds me of p-hacking in academia: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4359000/ is a decent overview.

And, to a certain extent, the manipulation of "league tables" in finance: https://mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-league... / https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB117616199089164489

All these allow a presenter to frame a discovery or result as "surprising" and "novel" - even if, from the very start, the rhetorical goal was to take a pre-ordained desire to publish along certain lines, and tweak things to present it as if it was a happenstance discovery, washing the presenter's hands of that intentionality.

One of the things I worry about, especially as education shifts more and more towards AI, is that we lose the critical thinking skill of: "here are a set of facts that are true, but there can still be bias in the process by which those facts are selected, thus one must look beyond the facts presented."

And in theory, AI could help us to do this with every fact we consume! But it's steered (quite intentionally) towards giving simple answers, even when reality isn't simple, and the underlying goal of those presenting the facts that entered one's corpus is as important as those facts' existence.

j_m_b ・ 6 hours ago

Oh I have some other common phrases I've been collecting!

"to be honest" "...the thing..." "I mean.." "Yah yah yah" people say this rapidly. It seems rude and dismissive to me so I've stopped doing it

  • alpaca128 ・ 5 hours ago

    I also reduced the use of those phrases, but more because they don't do much other than making the text longer. Except for things like "in my experience" or "as I understand" to signal that they're not meant as factual statements.

  • yuskii ・ 6 hours ago

    [dead]

mkehrt ・ 5 hours ago

From The Mote in God's Eye:

"Wrong," said Renner.

"The tactful way," Rod said quietly, "the polite way to disagree with the Senator would be to say, 'That turns out not to be the case.'"

Zariff ・ 6 hours ago

I always think of Andrew Ng's famous machine learning course whenever I hear someone say this phrase. He also used this phrase repeatedly in the videos.

  • Haul4ss ・ 5 hours ago

    Didn't he used to say "concretely" all the time as well?

    That was such a cool course. It seems ancient now, but I remember enjoying it at the time.

onionisafruit ・ 6 hours ago

It’s a fine phrase to let your reader know what the eventual conclusion will be, but you need to back up that conclusion to have any credibility.

vanschelven ・ 5 hours ago

Before clicking the link I thought this was going to be about over-usage of the term by LLMs... it's not in my personal "red flag" list but it does seem to have a general applicability that's not connected to actually having something to say that fits well with LLMs

LordGrey ・ 6 hours ago

Did anyone else get Semantic Satiation while reading that article? I started wondering what the origin of "it turns out" was. I got distracted, and from that point on, it just looked weird, not meaningful.

MattGrommes ・ an hour ago

One of my favorite additions to this phrase is Merlin Mann's use of "double turns out". This is useful for stuff like

"X is bad for you."

"Turns out X is actually great for you and it was Big Y spreading misinformation."

"Actually, turns out X is only terrible for dogs but nobody remembers that part of the story."

glst0rm ・ 6 hours ago

Similarly, when a speaker says "...right?" after making a statement with the implicit expectation that you agree. Sneaky weasels.

pvillano ・ 4 hours ago

Here are a few more scrutiny-deflecting phrases

* just: "Just rewrite it in Rust"

* simply: "To win at Jenga, simply remove one block from the bottom and put it on top."

* should: "We shouldn't have to wait"

I hate "should" the most because it can mean obligation, expectation, recommendation, or ideal. Any time you find yourself using "should", you should(I recommend) substitute something more specific

jasperry ・ 4 hours ago

It turns out Palpatine returned!

axus ・ 6 hours ago

It turns out that writers don't always tell the truth!

kazinator ・ 6 hours ago

I have also noticed is a kind of ironic use of "it turns out" for presenting personal experiences as being significant discoveries in the world at large.

"To the disappointment of my Asian parents, it turned out I hadn't shipped with the firmware needed to support violin playing."

If that turns out to be recent trend in rhetoric, that is mildly surprising.

When people make ironic uses of some rhetorical device, it inevitably happens that a number of people don't get the humor and start using it unironically, like that's the correct, casual thing to use for that situation.

afavour ・ 6 hours ago

Feels related to the idea of "exonerative tense", a way of phrasing things to subtly absolute yourself of responsibility for your own actions.

Puts me in mind of Trump being asked about the lack of evacuation plans around the Iran war, his response was "because it happened to all very quickly", as if it were a force of nature rather than something the administration had control over.

GuinansEyebrows ・ 6 hours ago

Reminds me of Seinfeld.

"I gotta tell you, I am loving this Yada Yada thing. You know, I can gloss over my whole life story."

  • ta2112 ・ an hour ago

    "But you yada yadaed over the best part."

    "No I mentioned the bisque."

flrlfmkhmem ・ 6 hours ago

Also used by Steve Jobs to great rhetorical effect.

renewiltord ・ 5 hours ago

I like pg’s essays but he enjoys these turns of phrase. On Twitter, he would previously use this puppeteer prop technique of “8 yo just figured out” or “just explained to 11 yo”.

Here’s a couple of made up uses:

“8 yo quickly figured out that Darwinism makes no sense”

“11 yo asked me why the sky was blue but quickly realized it was reflecting the sea”

It’s funny stuff. “Behold! Even my child has figured out that my position is true. Such is its self evidence” or “this idea is so true I’m teaching it to my kid”. Haha. Funny guy.

keybored ・ 7 hours ago

[deleted]

  • righthand ・ 6 hours ago

    I used to be quite the AI skeptic, I even tried it once or twice but it turns out that most people refused to use AI and our collective wallet voting was killing it. Nobody seemed to care as it turns out, not even the AI employees.

    • keybored ・ 6 hours ago

      It works both ways? ;-)

k0mplex ・ 5 hours ago

"I was struck by" is another

philwelch ・ 5 hours ago

The honest usage of “it turns out” is usually to gloss over an unnecessarily tedious argument that the author doesn’t want to waste your time with. And I think this is a fair characterization of even the use that the author criticizes here:

> When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It's an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn't like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.

In principle, it’s entirely possible that pg kept a detailed diary of his attempt to find a community of intellectual peers in NY that compared to the one he found in Cambridge, and if you read the entire diary you would be satisfied that he carried out an exhaustive search. But even if that were the case (I wouldn’t expect it to be; who keeps detailed diaries documenting every opinion they ever form), that would dominate the length of an essay that was supposed to be about how cities work as focus hubs for specific types of ambition.

That’s not to say pg can’t be wrong about this point; it’s still a statement of opinion. What “it turns out” really signifies is that the author made a serious effort to investigate the question prior to forming the conclusion. They might be lying about that, but they can also lie about facts.

I guess I just consider it an insult to the reader’s intelligence to say that ‘it turns out’ is a particularly deceptive way to sneak in an unsubstantiated conclusion, because it’s not very sneaky. If I said “it turns out the moon really is made of cheese”, nobody would be fooled. If Buzz Aldrin said it, a few people might be fooled, but only because they already know he’s actually been there.

On the other hand, we routinely accept “it turns out” reasoning all the time, in the sense that we generally trust other people to come to conclusions that we don’t feel the need to audit. If I get labs done at the doctor’s office and it turns out I have high cholesterol, I don’t have a particular need to audit the lab’s methodology. You can’t rigorously audit all of the information in the world and if a writer you reasonably trust writes “it turns out” that X, you are reasonably justified in updating your certainty that X is true.

esafak ・ 7 hours ago

It turns out you can write a whole article about something obvious?

  • nimonian ・ 6 hours ago

    I hope the irony of this comment isn't lost on the author of the article

  • zephen ・ 6 hours ago

    It turns out I'll never get those three minutes back.

Darkphibre ・ 6 hours ago

I was hesitant about this article being interesting, or a good use of my limited time, but it turns out it was well written and held an interesting insight!

I find it fascinating that, even aware of the importance of the phrase, I tend to gloss over it as one conceptual unit and hardly even register its existence, like the