“It turns out” (2010)

Source: Hacker News

Introduction

“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.

Origin of the Phrase

The phrase caught my attention because it often appears in contexts where the writer wants to present a discovery as neutral and surprising, thereby lending credibility to a claim without providing substantive evidence.

Illustrative Examples

Deli Example

Suppose I walk into a new deli expecting a roast‑beef sandwich, but the person at the counter says they don’t have roast beef. If I relay the disappointment to friends, I might say:

“You know that new deli on Fifth St.? It turns out they don’t even have roast beef!”

Movie Plot Twist

Or, describing a film with a striking twist, I could say:

“…and so they let him go, thinking nothing of it. But it turns out that he, the very guy they just let go, was the killer all along.”

Misuse in Argumentation

Now imagine I’m a writer trying to make an argument that hinges on a bold claim—say, that Cambridge, Massachusetts is the intellectual capital of the world. To dismiss other contenders like New York, I might write:

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.

That’s not an argument at all; it’s a blind assertion based only on personal experience. The only reason it might seem persuasive is that it’s couched in the same tone of surprised discovery used in the innocuous examples above—​as though after rigorous searching, the conclusion simply turned out that way.

Why It Works

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 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 something unexpected about a phenomenon you’ve studied extensively—​as in a scientist saying “…but the E. coli turned out to be totally resistant”—or a buried fact you’ve recently discovered for your readers—​as when Malcolm Gladwell says “…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 writers who use the phrase, largely because they associate it with 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. That 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 handy writerly shortcut, or, as pg would probably put it, a hack.