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.
[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"]
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
"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.'"
"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.
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.
> 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.
"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
> "..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."
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.
Original submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965
And with a response from pg.
I turns out that it's also a phrase which gets stuck on some peoples mind easily
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.
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
> 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.
* 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
https://web.archive.org/web/20100309032112/http://blog.ethan...
"I gotta tell you, I am loving this Yada Yada thing. You know, I can gloss over my whole life story."
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.
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.
I do if I'm looking to pad the essay or video to make it longer.
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.
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.
"No I mentioned the bisque."
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.
That was such a cool course. It seems ancient now, but I remember enjoying it at the time.
> 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.
---
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.
"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"
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".
"It turns out" became a favorite phrase of mine sometime in mid 2006, which, it turns out, was just about the time that I first started tearing through Paul Graham essays. Coincidence?
I think not. It's not that pg is a particularly heavy user of the phrase---I counted just 46 unique instances in a simple search of his site---but that he knows how to use it. He works it, gets mileage out of it, in a way that other writers don't.
That probably sounds like a compliment. But it turns out that "it turns out" does the sort of work, for a writer, that a writer should be doing himself. So 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.
Let me explain what I mean.
Suppose that I walk into a new deli expecting to get a sandwich with roast beef, but that when I place my order, the person working the counter says that they don't have roast beef. If I were to relay this little disappointment to my friends, I might say, "You know that new deli on Fifth St.? It turns out they don't even have roast beef!"
Or suppose instead that I'm trying to describe a movie to a friend, and that this particular movie includes a striking plot twist. If I wanted to be dramatic about it, I might say "...and so they let him go, thinking nothing of it. But it turns out that he, this very guy that they just let go, was the killer all along."
So far so good. Now suppose, finally, that I'm a writer trying to make an argument, and that my argument critically depends on a bit of a tall claim, on the sort of claim that a lot of people might dismiss the first time they heard it. Suppose, for example, that I'm trying to convince my readers that Cambridge, Massachusetts is the intellectual capital of the world. As part of my argument I'd have to rule out every other city, including very plausible contenders like New York. To do so, I might try something like this:
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.
Wait a second: that's not an argument at all! It's a blind assertion based only on my own experience. The only reason that it might sort of work is that it's couched in the same tone of surprised discovery used in those two innocuous examples above---as though after lots of rigorous searching, and trying, and fighting to find in New York the stuff that makes Cambridge the intellectual capital, it simply turned out---in the way that a pie crust might turn out to be too crispy, or a chemical solution might turn out to be acidic---not to be there.
That's what I mean when I say that pg (who, by the way, actually wrote that passage about Cambridge and New York) "gets mileage" out of the phrase: he takes advantage of the fact that it so often accompanies real, simple, occasionally hard-won neutral observations.
In other words, because "it turns out" is the sort of phrase you would use to convey, for example, something unexpected about a phenomenon you've studied extensively---as in the scientist saying "...but the E. coli turned out to be totally resistant"---or some buried fact that you have recently discovered on behalf of your readers---as when the Malcolm Gladwells of the world say "...and it turns out all these experts have something in common: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice"---readers are trained, slowly but surely, to be disarmed by it. They learn to trust the writers who use the phrase, in large part because they come to associate it with that feeling of the author's own dispassionate surprise: "I, too, once believed X," the author says, "but whaddya know, X turns out to be false."
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. Which is precisely what the phrase "it turns out" accomplishes, and why it's so useful in circumstances where you don't have any substantive path from X to Y. In that sense it's a kind of handy writerly shortcut or, as pg would probably put it, a hack.