10 ms·
“It turns out”
- bdr 17y agoNot 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 17y ago"So, it turns out that virality is a big win." That phrase is the 1973 high school yearbook of the startup culture.
- brh 17y agoDouglas 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 17y agoThe 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.
- thibaut_barrere 17y ago> But it's a two-edged sword I second that. Use this kind of speak with people that are aware of rhetoric, neuro-linguistic programming or non-violent-communication (for instance) and you will shoot you in the foot deep.
- khafra 17y agoWithout 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.
- raheemm 17y agoThat was an absolutely brilliant analysis. Such an innocent phrase can be so powerfully and deceptively persuasive!
- nzmsv 17y agoHuman 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 ;)
- SandB0x 17y agoGreat 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 17y agoSometimes 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 17y agoSure, 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 17y agoAlthough 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.
- jacobolus 17y agoSometimes even an “intuitively hand-waved” proof substitute, it turns out, is well beyond the scope of the course. (Then again, I’ve had uncommonly thorough math courses, and would likely share your frustration.)
- roundsquare 17y agootherwise nobody would have tried to prove them in the first place. Not really. Sometimes someone sees a bunch of examples and wonders if there is a generalization/theorem. So they set out to prove it and 3 pages of symbol manipulation later you have a proof.
- jluxenberg 17y ago"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 http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris
- godDLL 17y agoThat 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».
- carbocation 17y agoWow, 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 17y agoIn 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 17y agoSometimes (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."
- petercooper 17y agoLoved 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 17y agoWilliam 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.
- nollidge 17y agoNot necessarily "hacks" per se, but Language Log is quite good: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
- jraines 17y agoI occasionally return to this and browse around: http://www.nt.armstrong.edu/terms.htm http://www.nt.armstrong.edu/terms.htm The examples are great.
- thibaut_barrere 17y agoYou have to read this (I read the french version, I hope the english one is close): A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583227652 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583227652
- h34t 17y ago"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?
- _4lri 17y agoIs it possible to call someone on this in conversation without being rude? e.g. "What do you mean 'it turns out'?"
- TheSOB88 17y agoI'd be more concerned with people doing it in essays.
- machrider 17y ago"Cool, where did you learn that?"
- Semiapies 17y agoBut that's too much like conversationally asking a question about a detail, instead of leaping on a harmless locution with an intent to prove superiority. What good is that?
- cellis 17y ago"Care to cite some specific examples?" or, brasher "Citation needed."
- nollidge 17y ago> "Citation needed." And you have to hold your hands up to indicate [square braces].
- pg 17y agoI 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.
- gilesbowkett235 17y agoI think he wasn't calling the phrase itself deceptive. I think he's saying that you use it in an undisciplined way. From the final paragraph: [the phrase is] useful in circumstances where you don’t have any substantive path from X to Y. Nothing personal, but I think he's onto something. Especially if you take a more generous outlook and expand it to "circumstances where you don't demonstrate any substantive path from X to Y." (Even if somebody fails to demonstrate a substantive path, the path might still exist.) Re: patterns, there was a blogger who did some kind of screen-scraping, machine learning, NLP analysis of my blog and claimed their analysis proved I was really a bot. I would take that kind of thing with a grain of salt.
- jurjenh 17y agoI think that it serves to make reading an essay more fluid, as you can crop a lot of unnecessary information this way. If every "it turns out" was to follow the path that came to the conclusion, then there'd be a lot of extra detail that would divert the reader from the intended direction, without providing necessary information. And if the exact path is illuminating in some way, but distracting from the original intent, then it would serve to put the explanation in a footnote.
- bootload 17y ago"... I'd be interested to see a list of all the 46 passages though ..." There is more than 46 (725) ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fpaulgraham.com+%22it+turns+out%22 http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fpaulgraha... If there is a pattern, could it be emerging from "asking questions", thinking, then finding non-obvious or surprising results? Reading through the authors site I found this gem also another explanation. "... If one is convinced that mind is a computer program, or at least if one thinks of that as a fruitful metaphor, it may be helpful to think about these “thought-generating phrases” as function calls. They are like little labels that execute a useful module, or packaged set of computational instructions. And the point is, just having a label makes it easier to find the code, and therefore more likely that you’ll execute it. Which is exactly what you want if the code is worth calling. ..." ~ http://jsomers.net/blog/generating-thoughts http://jsomers.net/blog/generating-thoughts It quite possible the phrase, "it turns out" is also a thought generating phrase.
- adelevie 17y agoUsing 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 17y agoYour statement asserts fact! Have you read about E Prime? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
- blasdel 17y agoHow unfortunate that you couldn't avoid the troublesome word yourself when identifying its failings. Besides, the underlying problem has more to do with the verb "to be" (from which "is" conjugates) and the assumption of universal identity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
- grandalf 17y agoIn 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.
- mburney 17y agoI 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.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- owinebarger 17y agoThe 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 17y agoI 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.
- natch 17y agoIt'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.
- saikat 17y agoPG'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.
- unwind 17y agoI'm at least glad the title wasn't "It turns out considered harmful", which would probably have crashed people's parsers for a while. :)
- JoeAltmaier 17y agoTrips my BS detector. Like "Really!" and "You know,".
- eplanit 17y agoHear, 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 17y ago"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.
- jacoblyles 17y agojsomers 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.