[HN Gopher] "It turns out" (2010)
___________________________________________________________________
"It turns out" (2010)
Author : Munksgaard
Score : 220 points
Date : 2026-03-04 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jsomers.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (jsomers.net)
| amiga386 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It turns out you can write a whole article about something
| obvious?
| nimonian wrote:
| I hope the irony of this comment isn't lost on the author of
| the article
| zephen wrote:
| It turns out I'll never get those three minutes back.
| NicolasCornwall wrote:
| 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
| amiga386 wrote:
| For those that don't have 4 hours to spare:
| 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.
| gwd wrote:
| 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."
| turnsout wrote:
| Turns out I was onto something
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| "It Turns Out" (2010)
|
| user?id=turnsout (2020)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Id Turns Out? There's 16 numbers from d to t, counting t.
| 2010 + 16. OMG Turns out they were on to something!
| rmellow wrote:
| I think y'all are _on_ something.
| thom wrote:
| When I saw this title on HN, I immediately thought it was going
| to be about The Salmon of Doubt.
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| 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.
| pmg102 wrote:
| 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
| keybored wrote:
| [deleted]
| righthand wrote:
| I used to be quite the AI skeptic, I even tried it once or
| twice but it turns out that most people refused to use AI and
| our collective wallet voting was killing it. Nobody seemed to
| care as it turns out, not even the AI employees.
| keybored wrote:
| It works both ways? ;-)
| onionisafruit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It turns out that writers don't always tell the truth!
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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"
| yegle wrote:
| I don't see the example would be different in conveying the
| same meaning if you omit the whole "85 turns out that".
| dack wrote:
| if 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Right, to tease apart some other subtext it might be used with:
|
| 1. This stuff is is tricky, and that's normal.
|
| 2. We are both on the same side trying to understand it.
|
| 3. The stuff is _interesting_.
| xnorswap wrote:
| ( 2010 )
|
| Original submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965
|
| And with a response from pg.
| Zariff wrote:
| 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.
| Haul4ss wrote:
| Didn't he used to say "concretely" all the time as well?
|
| That was such a cool course. It seems ancient now, but I
| remember enjoying it at the time.
| flrlfmkhmem wrote:
| Also used by Steve Jobs to great rhetorical effect.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| vanschelven wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| 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.
| loevborg wrote:
| PS all 17 hits for "it turns out" in the repository are from
| other speakers.
| j_m_b wrote:
| 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
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I also reduced the use of those phrases, but more because they
| don't do much other than making the text longer. Except for
| things like "in my experience" or "as I understand" to signal
| that they're not meant as factual statements.
| glst0rm wrote:
| Similarly, when a speaker says "...right?" after making a
| statement with the implicit expectation that you agree. Sneaky
| weasels.
| cristoperb wrote:
| 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.
| beezlewax wrote:
| You also explained what you were going to explain here
| cristoperb wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| If you're writing a YouTube script, just, stop. They're so
| tiresome.
| maest wrote:
| I enjoy longform yt essays. Many others do too, based on view
| counts
| travisjungroth wrote:
| That jumped out to me because you see it in YouTube videos so
| much now. I was surprised at the age of this post.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Language 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.
| quectophoton wrote:
| > Language 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.
|
| Supernatural highlights this on S1E08, at 27:28. Dean was
| talking with someone and starts saying "the truth is" but the
| other person instantly cuts him off saying "you know who
| starts their sentences with 'the truth is'? Liars".
| pvillano wrote:
| If the literal meaning doesn't make sense, derive the meaning
| from the way it is used.
|
| "To be honest" typically means "Here is an opinion that I'm
| embarrassed to share, and would rather lie about"
|
| They're not lying about everything else, they're lying about
| that one thing, every other time.
|
| e.g. "I tell people my favorite movie is 'The Godfather',
| but, to be honest, it's actually Ratatouille"
| thwarted wrote:
| > _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 do if I'm looking to pad the essay or video to make it
| longer.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Reminds me of Mark Twain's advice to writers, "Any time you
| want to write 'very' write 'damn' instead so your editor will
| remove it."
| pmichaud wrote:
| I think it's more like a sign post in the text. At the start of
| any paragraph (or sentence, really) the text may go literally
| anywhere--could be a new thought, a continuation of an implicit
| list, an explanation of what came previous, or anything else.
|
| If you say something weird or apparently unsupported, the savvy
| reader at that very moment is going to be thinking so. So it's
| helpful to orient them like:
|
| > Here's a wild sentence. Here's why it's not actually that
| wild: reasons
|
| Without the connecting phrase, the reader has to figure out
| from context that out of all the possible things the following
| text could be doing, what it's actually doing is explaining the
| previous claim.
|
| You can rightly counterpoint that it's not strictly necessary,
| that a savvy reader can figure it out. But I think the moment
| right after a wild statement is a hotspot for readers getting
| ready to jettison, and having a little assurance is likely very
| helpful.
| tomcatfish wrote:
| It turns out that both phrases are used like this, similarly
| to how they teach in logic classes that "but" is just "and"
| in fancy clothing, but actual usage is quite different.
| Actually, a _lot_ of language is just signpost phrasing that
| "helps the medicine go down" by giving hints at how the
| following idea will connect to this one.
|
| ---
|
| Both phrases are used like this-- let me explain:
|
| Logic classes teach that "but" is just "and" in fancy
| clothing, and actual usage is quite different. A _lot_ of
| language is signpost phrasing that "helps the medicine go
| down" by giving hints at how the following idea will connect
| to this one.
| kazinator wrote:
| 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.
| LordGrey wrote:
| 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.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| Reminds 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 wrote:
| "But you yada yadaed over the best part."
|
| "No I mentioned the bisque."
| afavour wrote:
| Feels 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 wrote:
| Before 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 wrote:
| From 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 wrote:
| > 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/ is a decent
| overview.
|
| And, to a certain extent, the manipulation of "league tables" in
| finance: https://mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-
| league... / 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 wrote:
| > 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=42939439
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697283
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39754588
| philwelch wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| "I was struck by" is another
| jasperry wrote:
| It turns out Palpatine returned!
| jrm4 wrote:
| Haven'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 wrote:
| Here 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| One 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."
| jakub_g wrote:
| Semi-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.
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