5 ms·
“It turns out” (2010)
- amiga386 7mo agoturns out... little monkey fella [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 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 https://scrimpton.com/ep/ep-podcast-S1E10#pos-280-280 "little monkey fella"]
- esafak 7mo agoIt turns out you can write a whole article about something obvious?
- NicolasCornwall 7mo agoCheck 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 7mo agoFor those that don't have 4 hours to spare: https://youtu.be/yDp3cB5fHXQ?t=2339 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- gwd 7mo agoThis 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."
- turnsout 7mo agoTurns out I was onto something
- DetroitThrow 7mo ago"It Turns Out" (2010) user?id=turnsout (2020)
- bryanrasmussen 7mo agoId Turns Out? There's 16 numbers from d to t, counting t. 2010 + 16. OMG Turns out they were on to something!
- rmellow 7mo agoI think y'all are on something.
- thom 7mo agoWhen I saw this title on HN, I immediately thought it was going to be about The Salmon of Doubt.
- SunshineTheCat 7mo agoIt 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.
- pmg102 7mo agoA phrase also beloved of Adam Curtis, along with starting new sentences with conjunctions. "But this was a fantasy." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg
- keybored 7mo ago[deleted]
- onionisafruit 7mo agoIt’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.
- Darkphibre 7mo agoI 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
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- axus 7mo agoIt turns out that writers don't always tell the truth!
- jasonmp85 7mo ago[dead]
- wongarsu 7mo agoThere 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"
- yegle 7mo agoI don't see the example would be different in conveying the same meaning if you omit the whole "85 turns out that".
- dack 7mo agoif 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)
- Modified3019 7mo agoThat’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 7mo agoThere'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.
- imgabe 7mo ago
- xnorswap 7mo ago( 2010 ) Original submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965 And with a response from pg.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dang 7mo agoThanks! Macroexpanded: “It Turns Out” (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25556578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25556578 - Dec 2020 (29 comments) Paul Graham and "It turns out" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633802 - Aug 2010 (15 comments) “It turns out” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965 - March 2010 (63 comments, with pg's response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163194)
- Zariff 7mo agoI 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.
- flrlfmkhmem 7mo agoAlso used by Steve Jobs to great rhetorical effect.
- kryptiskt 7mo agoOne 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>"
- jonahx 7mo agoInteresting 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.ethanjfast.com/2010/03/as-it-turns-out-is-quite-innocuous/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100309032112/http://blog.ethan...
- vanschelven 7mo agoThe 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.
- tptacek 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoI 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.
- loevborg 7mo agoI'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 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 7mo agoPS all 17 hits for "it turns out" in the repository are from other speakers.
- j_m_b 7mo agoOh 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
- glst0rm 7mo agoSimilarly, when a speaker says "...right?" after making a statement with the implicit expectation that you agree. Sneaky weasels.
- cristoperb 7mo agoThis 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.
- travisjungroth 7mo agoThat jumped out to me because you see it in YouTube videos so much now. I was surprised at the age of this post.
- beezlewax 7mo agoYou also explained what you were going to explain here
- cristoperb 7mo agoI 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.
- projektfu 7mo agoIf you're writing a YouTube script, just, stop. They're so tiresome.
- maest 7mo agoI enjoy longform yt essays. Many others do too, based on view counts
- keyringlight 7mo agoLanguage 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.
- kazinator 7mo agoI 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.
- LordGrey 7mo agoDid 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.
- GuinansEyebrows 7mo agoReminds 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 7mo ago"But you yada yadaed over the best part." "No I mentioned the bisque."
- afavour 7mo agoFeels 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.
- vanschelven 7mo agoBefore 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
- mkehrt 7mo agoFrom 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.'"
- btown 7mo 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/ 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-tables/ https://mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-league... / https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB117616199089164489 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.
- n4r9 7mo ago> Wait a second: that's not an argument at all! It's a blind assertion based only on my own experience. The (admittedly few) PG essays I've read do seem to have a habit of hiding tall claims, as I've posted about before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43566675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43566675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39754588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39754588
- philwelch 7mo agoThe 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.
- renewiltord 7mo agoI 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.
- k0mplex 7mo ago"I was struck by" is another
- jasperry 7mo agoIt turns out Palpatine returned!
- squeefers 7mo ago[dead]
- jrm4 7mo agoHaven'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?
- pvillano 7mo agoHere 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
- rpdillon 7mo agoThis mirrors my personal list very closely. I don't mind "it turns out" or "to be honest", but "just" and "should" I feel are often used to manipulate someone into agreeing.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoIt 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.
- MattGrommes 7mo agoOne 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."
- bitdestroyer 7mo agobock bock
- jakub_g 7mo agoSemi-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.
- OJFord 7mo agoSo, in 2026 I feel like this is no longer anywhere near the top of my list of annoying, completely redundant speech things.
- medi8r 7mo agoI have a duvet. It turns out.
- jackmott42 7mo agooh, paul grahams eassays! Speaking of, how are his efforts to help this administration cut down no woke youth? Does he still think racism isn't as bad a "the left" thinks, after Elon's Nazi salute and the thousands of ICE agents brutalized immigrants, murdered citizens, while cheered on by half the country, then invaded Iran because the Christian right thinks its a holy war against Muslims?
- getnormality 7mo agoThere is much less to this essay than meets the eye. It boils down to this: 1. The author thinks "it turns out" should only be used to express discovery of objectively surprising facts. 2. Paul Graham sometimes uses "it turns out" to express discovery of subjectively surprising facts. 3. The author finds the difference between his opinion and Paul Graham's opinion objectionable. It turns out that people use stock phrases in different ways!
- dap 7mo agoI don’t think that sums up the post well. I would say: The phrase “it turns out” has a surprising way of disarming skepticism in readers. While surprising, it’s easy to understand: the phrase suggests a story of the author’s journey of believing one thing, investigating, and finding something different. That’s more credible than simply saying the thing they now believe. The touch of vulnerability (admitting being wrong) avoids the reader’s ego getting defensive when asked to admit they were wrong. The net result is that it’s surprisingly easy to be convinced without any real argument. I’ve noticed this as well (often in podcasts and programs like Radiolab) and I think it’s quite valuable to just be aware of it as a reader/listener, if you care about thinking critically about your own beliefs.
- getnormality 7mo agoYes, the post is evaluating a personal essay of subjective experiences as if it is an obscured mechanism for convincing people about factual claims.
- chkaloon 7mo agoMassimo Pigliucci's favorite phrase. Used to drive me insane listening to Rationally Speaking
- jb1991 7mo agoI think Steve Jobs also used this phrase or something very similar often.
- tpoacher 7mo agoArgument: > It turns out it's X! Counterargument: > Ah, but here's the thing! Actually, it turns out it isn't X! Everything is well with the world again. Better yet. Make a cartoon / infographic / meme of someone 'superior' explaining to someone 'inferior' that X is true. Extra points if the 'inferior' person does something unrelatedly obnoxious or stupid in the panel. Seems to me this is the strongest form of argument used for anything these days. The only way to counter that form of argument is to make your own cartoon / infographic / meme. Nothing else even gets close (it turns out).
- nixcoder42 7mo ago[dead]