> "..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."
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
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.
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>"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 79.5 ms ] thread[fyi, this is one of those misquotes like "play it again sam" or "scotty beam me up": https://scrimpton.com/ep/ep-xfm-S3E07#pos-1138 "turns out it was a little monkey" + https://scrimpton.com/ep/ep-podcast-S1E10#pos-280-280 "little monkey fella"]
I turns out that it's also a phrase which gets stuck on some peoples mind easily
> "..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."
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.
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
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.
1. This stuff is is tricky, it's normal to guess wrong and need to revise our understanding.
2. We are both on the same side, facing the challenge.
3. The potential for surprise makes this stuff interesting.
Original submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965
And with a response from pg.
“It Turns Out” (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25556578 - Dec 2020 (29 comments)
Paul Graham and "It turns out" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633802 - Aug 2010 (15 comments)
“It turns out” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965 - March 2010 (63 comments, with pg's response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163194)
https://web.archive.org/web/20100309032112/http://blog.ethan...
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.
"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
> 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.
"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.
"I gotta tell you, I am loving this Yada Yada thing. You know, I can gloss over my whole life story."
"No I mentioned the bisque."