“It turns out” (2010)

amiga386

turns 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 "turns out it was a little monkey" + https://scrimpton.com/ep/ep-podcast-S1E10#pos-280-280 "little monkey fella"]

esafak

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

NicolasCornwall

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

gwd

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."

pmg102

A 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

onionisafruit

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.

Darkphibre

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

axus

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

wongarsu

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"

xnorswap

( 2010 ) Original submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965 And with a response from pg.

Zariff

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.

flrlfmkhmem

Also used by Steve Jobs to great rhetorical effect.

kryptiskt

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>"

jonahx

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...

loevborg

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.

j_m_b

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

glst0rm

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

cristoperb

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.

kazinator

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.