

“It turns out” - jsomers
http://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out

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brh
Douglas Adams summed it up nicely in _The Salmon of Doubt_ :

"Incidentally, 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."

~~~
lotharbot
The other phrases put the emphasis on some particular unnamed authority that
you read or heard. "It turns out" puts the emphasis on the "it" -- on
existence, reality, or fact. It makes it sound as though "the real" is your
authority -- that you drilled all the way down, and found the particular facts
were thus-and-such.

When the phrase is used in everyday speech, in my experience, it's usually
true. I went to the local grocer and "it turns out" (meaning, I checked and I
asked and) they don't carry such-and-such. That's what makes it such a
powerful device: there's implicit trust when someone claims to have done the
research.

But it's a two-edged sword. If you make a habit of abusing the phrase, and it
turns out you're demonstrably wrong on occasion, opponents will begin to view
the phrase with extra suspicion, and hammer you on not providing the actual
"it" that turns out.

~~~
khafra
Without using a conjugation of "to be," the phrase manages to do everything
E-prime sets out to avoid by banning that verb. I think this is the most
egregious specific failure I've noticed so far from E-prime.

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carbocation
Wow, it's interesting to see how people in different fields make use of this
term. In medicine, when I say "it turns out," I am often conceding that I just
discovered an obvious connection that I should have discovered days earlier:

* "It turns out that our patient with salmonella has a pet lizard."

On the other hand, when I am trying to convey my knowledge in, say, human
genetics in a humble fashion and convey to the reader that it's OK that they
didn't know what I'm about to say, I'll also use "it turns out:"

* "It turns out that every gene found to cause Mendelian lipid disorders also has common variants discovered by genome-wide association studies."

~~~
gabrielroth
In the pet-lizard case, aren't you using the phrase with mild irony? Something
like, "After painstaking analysis coupled with a few brilliant flashes of
insight, I managed to deduce this totally obvious fact"?

~~~
carbocation
Sometimes (often, even)! But with that particular example, it's actually more
like, "I didn't ask the questions that many second-year medical students might
ask after finding out a patient had salmonella."

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petercooper
Loved this post. The foibles of rhetoric and language "hacks" fascinate me.
I'd subscribe to a blog that posted stuff like this regularly - not least
because I'd like to learn similar rhetorical "tricks." Anyone know of any (or
even books)?

~~~
retro
William Safire's weekly "On Language" piece in the Sunday New York Times did
this type of thing for decades and was required reading in my English classes.
Sadly he passed on recently but you should be able to find stuff like this in
his books or in his articles in the NYT Archive.

~~~
Angostura
I think Safire would probably have suggested that you used "died" rather than
"passed on". No?

~~~
rtperson
He would also have suggested a comma after "sadly," so that it's obvious that
it's the writer's comment, rather than a modifier on the way Safire died.

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pg
I don't think using the phrase "it turns out" is intrinsically deceptive.
Pragmatically it's just declarative sentence + expression of surprise.

I'd be interested to see a list of all the 46 passages though. I wonder if
there are patterns.

~~~
klipt
It tu... I mean, I _suspect_ that it's ability to 'deceive' correlates
strongly with how much you trust the author on that subject in the first
place.

If someone tell me "turns out, the astrologers have been right all along!" ...
that's not going to sway me unless they're sitting in front of a library of
relevant peer reviewed evidence, and can guess which irrational number I'm
thinking of.

~~~
Semiapies
That's because critical thinking is an entirely different activity from
looking for key phrases. :)

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adelevie
Using the word "is" is troublesome. It spares the writer of any need to
explain his/her authority in making such a statement. eg "This article is not
useful."

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Your statement asserts fact! Have you read about E Prime?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime>

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SandB0x
Great article on a pet hate of mine.

"It turns out" is often used in mathematics lectures, when the lecturer is
trying to keep things relatively informal and is avoiding proving results.
Blind assertions have no place in mathematics - it's much better to provide an
intuitive explanation in the spirit of the proof.

~~~
lotharbot
Sometimes the proof isn't intuitive. Sometimes "it turns out" that if you just
crank through this ugly mess of symbols, you get out this result. This is more
common on the applied side of mathematics than on the pure side, but I've seen
it in both.

~~~
SandB0x
Sure, rigorous proofs are often obtained by "proceeding formally", but there's
usually (not always, granted) some more intuitive reason as to why something
should be the case, otherwise nobody would have tried to prove them in the
first place.

~~~
eru
Although some proofs can accumulate cruft.

E.g. there was a small and nice intuitive prove of a reasonable theorem in the
first place, but scores of people found ways to generalize it, and in the end
you have a mess of symbols proving a hopelessly general lemma.

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owinebarger
The author conflates usage in situations where conclusions are certain ("It
turns out Fermat's Last Theorem is false." * ) with ones that merely express
the author's opinion or conclusion: "After a life long quest for the perfect
smoked meat, it turns out I hate pastrami." In the latter case the author is
only telling you the conclusion he's reached, not attempting to convince you
of its truth.

* Yes, this sentence is false.

~~~
Angostura
I would trust the author's judgement in matters such as "I hate pastrami". If
(s)he had said "... it turns out all pastrami is horrible" I think you would
have a stronger case.

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jluxenberg
_"to say that someone uses the phrase particularly well is really just an
underhanded way of saying that they’re particularly good at being lazy"_

Larry Wall counts laziness as one of the key "great virtues of a programmer"
<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris>

~~~
godDLL
That would be a different kind of laziness. In one case you're looking at
someone, that given a task, actively searches for a way to accomplish it
optimally. In the other, it turns out, you're looking at someone completely
going around the task, redefining it.

The result is not the same. But if it is interchangeable, that makes for a
useful trait indeed. We call it «hacking».

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natch
It's one of several intros that work in a cute way now that we have status
update habits (twitter and facebook):

    
    
      "it turns out..."
      "ProTip:..."
      "apparently..."
    

I caught myself using these a lot, and it seemed like every time I used them,
I was trying to be cute. Now they are banned.

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nzmsv
Human languages (un)fortunately cannot be parsed unambiguously. I think most
readers know a difference between a piece of writing written for entertainment
and one they can use to make substantiated scientific claims.

Also, I would not dismiss personal experiences. Turns out they are what life
is made of ;)

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mburney
I don't understand the criticism here. "It turns out that X" is just another
way of asserting that "X" is true. And a writer does not have to justify all
of his assertions. An unjustified assertion could merely be just another
premise for the argument.

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unwind
I'm at least glad the title wasn't "It turns out considered harmful", which
would probably have crashed people's parsers for a while. :)

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grandalf
In my opinion this sort of phrase conveys the opposite of laziness... it is
evidence that the author has gone to great lengths to coerce his gut feelings
into something that seems rational, plausible, and convincing.

This sort of phrase works like a logical/causal exoskeleton intended to
support the far more loosely linked set of intuitions that motivated the
author to write/communicate about the topic.

These sorts of things are not even necessarily the biproduct of conscious
thought. We are trained by academe that our intuitions must be served on a
platter of logic and causality, and our sparks of inspiration (or emotion) are
rarely experienced in remotely the same way that we would communicate them, so
we back-fill.

Ponder this the next time you have a spark of insight about something and then
contemplate telling someone else about it. Notice how your brain adds on the
trappings of logical structure ex post. In some cases the idea was highly
logical and the trappings come easily, while in other cases the idea is
moderately ill-formed or speculative and one notices his/her brain being
effortful in its quest to find the logical/persuasive platter on which to
present the concoction to others.

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h34t
"that’s not an argument at all! It’s a blind assertion based only on my own
experience"

And this is a problem, making assertions/arguments based on direct experience?

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retro
Is it possible to call someone on this in conversation without being rude?
e.g. "What do you mean 'it turns out'?"

~~~
cellis
"Care to cite some specific examples?"

or, brasher

"Citation needed."

~~~
nollidge
> "Citation needed."

And you have to hold your hands up to indicate [square braces].

~~~
Groxx
Or, if you're going for wiki-formatting, you somehow need to crook your hands
& fingers into weird {{double-curly braces}}. Seems more painful than air-
quotes...

~~~
nollidge
Might be possible with shadow-puppetry... I'll work on it this weekend and
publish the RFC on Monday.

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bdr
Not relevant to the OP, but: I had never heard this phrase used so much before
moving out here to California. Is it a local thing? I think it's especially
over-represented here when preceded by "so": "So, it turns out that virality
is a big win."

~~~
byrneseyeview
_"So, it turns out that virality is a big win."_

That phrase is the 1973 high school yearbook of the startup culture.

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saikat
PG's assertions based on anecdotal or no evidence used to be one of my main
complaints about his older essays. Though I often still agreed with his
overall points, I didn't like how he would reach them. Having said that, it's
definitely hard to toe the line between succinctness and backing up your
claims.

But, as it turns out, he's gotten a lot better about substantiating his
claims. I'm tempted not to substantiate my claim after that sentence, but his
presentation at startup school last year was pretty much all about the
evidence.

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eplanit
Hear, hear!

While we're at it, can we please add "At the end of the day..." to the list of
pseudo-pithy (and indeed lazy) phrases to retire, too. JFK coined "in the
final analysis..." which hung around for years, and years. "At the End of the
Day" took its place, but has become just as tiresome, and meaningless.

~~~
philwelch
"At the end of the day" is a Britishism that got transported over here during
the leadup to the Iraq war, mainly because Tony Blair used it so much. I
actually have not heard it very much recently.

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JoeAltmaier
Trips my BS detector. Like "Really!" and "You know,".

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jacoblyles
jsomers is the best writer I have found so far on Hacker News, short of Paul
Graham. I tried to think of better, but it turns out that he is just more
interesting and thoughtful than your average front page blogger.

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raheemm
That was an absolutely brilliant analysis. Such an innocent phrase can be so
powerfully and deceptively persuasive!

