“It turns out”
by James Somers, February 28, 2010
"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.
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A good catch!
Something else I noticed about PG is that he is the MASTER of metaphors. He often sums up a complex point by relating it to an every day situation everyone understands, and it’s really effective for driving a point home.
I too believed this was really just a cop out. But that turns out not to be the case.
Douglas Adams had something similar to say about “it turns out”. I’d forgotten where, but apparently it was in “The Salmon of Doubt”. The excerpt is here: http://www.halexandria.org/dward406.htm
It turns out that this phrase, and the insight on its usefulness to create authority out of thin air, was used with great effect by Douglas Adams. See #11 here: http://www.halexandria.org/dward406.htm
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“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.”
Well put, my friend.
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He who Smelt It Dealt It
it turns out
the phrase is not used to make an argument
it introduces a ‘novel’ idea or argument
often this term is used as a little show of intellect by those who are fully aware of its real intent
which is using deliberate provocative vagueness so the active reader – the presumed intended audience – will pay attention to the formal argument, now cued up for analysis
a writer’s trick
[…] out there, here’s a great post on the expression “It turns out” from the jsomers.net blog (via Ben […]
“It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.” (4/2/2010)
one word: “RADIOLAB”
I don’t get it. Either Y is true or it’s not. If it’s true then adding “it turns out that Y” is not any more or less true than Y (except to the extent that the speaker may never have believed otherwise, but even then the statement is primarily about the truth of Y). If Y is false then “It turns out that Y” is no more misleading. Without “it turns out” you may not be conveying a change of belief or rigorous research, but you are still claiming you know something to be true, when you really don’t.
It turns out, oddly enough, that Paul Graham is overrated.
Boris, in the case of an opinion, Y can be true for the speaker without being true for the audience, though the audience is told by the phrase “it turns out” that Y is an inevitable truth. “What I found” would answer your objection and be more accurate than “it turns out”.
I was thinking of the possible uses of itturnsout.com, but it turns out that it has already been registered. Today.
“It turns out” is a useful phrase when explaining mathematics, and I think the usage in mathematics sheds some light on how the phrase works more generally.
The ordinary convention is that if I claim X in the course of a proof or explanation, then you should be able to grasp why X is true in that context. It is supposed to be fully justified by the preceding discussion.
But if I say “it turns out that X,” I’m acknowledging that I am not giving you sufficient justification, but merely asserting that X can be shown to be true. You could work out why for yourself or look it up, if you like, but let’s skip the details for now.
Note that skipping the details is not necessarily a matter of laziness. It is often just being kind to one’s audience by keeping the focus on what’s important and accessible. The original post nails this usage in the last paragraph: if the writer says “it turns out,” then “readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y.”
(A more traditional locution in formal mathematical writing is “It can be shown [or proved] that X.” However, I would use “it turns out” more broadly, even where my claim X is not a formal statement of a theorem: “It turns out that the most important distinction in this setting is between acyclic and cyclic graphs, which require different analyses.”)
I think in the mathematical context, the ONLY thing signaled by “it turns out” is that I am reporting the result of some work. Ordinarily I am suppressing the details of the work, but even that’s not necessary, as these examples show: “So, to summarize the previous 3 pages, it turns out that no voting system can have all of our desired features.” “Happily, it turns out that X. Let’s see why.”
I doubt the many other properties that the original post claims for “it turns out.” At least in the mathematical context, when I insert “it turns out,” I’m not doing so to signal any extra inevitability (“having no say in the matter”) or “dispassion”: after all, the obvious proof steps that didn’t require “it turns out” were just as inevitable and dispassionate. I’m not expressing surprise at the result (“taken aback”), or implying that it is particularly difficult (“hard-won”), or claiming that I was the one who proved X (“air of discovery”), or even claiming that I understand the proof of X myself. All of those would be meaningful and reasonable things to say while teaching math, but “it turns out” doesn’t say any of them by itself.
So are we sure that “it turns out” directly expresses any of these things in non-mathematical contexts? Or is it merely correlated with some of them without causing them?
Non-mathematical contexts do allow more kinds of evidentiary support and more degrees of belief, so it is conceivable that “it turns out” could interact with some of these. But does it?
The examples in the post seem no different from the math case. They’re all signaling that someone had to do some work to establish the statement: you had to watch the rest of the movie, visit the deli, do the scientific experiments, etc.
As for the (single) Graham example, compare the following: (1) “I kept searching for Columbia University. It turned out that it was way, way uptown.” (2) “I kept searching for Columbia University. It was way, way uptown.” Which do you think is better written, and why? (1) uses “it turns out” in just the way it is used in mathematics: to indicate that the speaker is reporting the result of some work. (2) is less helpful: it doesn’t connect the two sentences, and in fact leaves it uncertain whether the speaker actually discovered the location of Columbia as a result of the search (versus already knowing it or learning it weeks later).
Obviously Paul is (jokingly) asking us to believe something implausible when he writes “I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.” But given the Columbia example, I don’t see that “it turned out” is extra sauce aimed at making his fanciful story more plausible. It’s just one normal way to tell any seeking-and-finding story.
Now, how about deception? Of course any language can be used deceptively: “it turns out” can be used to make false or dubious claims. But I am not sure that it gets any special mileage in disguising such claims. Certainly, “it turns out that X” is a strong statement. But I think the writer is being perfectly up-front about the strength of the statement: both that she is claiming X as fact rather than opinion (see Ryan Platte’s comment), and also that she is asserting but not necessarily providing support for the claim. The reader sees this and can choose whether or not to buy in. In fact, when I am reviewing a mathematical paper and I see “it turns out,” that is a good, honest, explicit alert that some suppressed details need to be checked.
Much more deceptive are factive presuppositions, which smuggle in possibly false or dubious claims as if they were background knowledge already shared by the reader: “Some people know/realize/recognize/have noticed that X.” “It is surprising/interesting/unfortunate that X.” But “it turns out” is not in this category.
Of course, the original post may be correct that “it turns out” is associated with reasonable, scientific, fact-based discourse, and so may make the reader more likely to trust the writer. But that’s merely like the way certain NY Times columnists get some mileage out of using a reasonable tone to suck people in … it’s not the reasonable tone’s fault.
Thanks for this, Professor—your analysis is crisp, and I see now how its usage in mathematics makes more apparent the core function of the phrase.
All I’ll say in the way of a defense of its having those other functions I claimed for it—inevitability, dispassion, an air of discovery, deception, etc., etc.—is to re-emphasize the way in which the use of “it turns out” by lazy writers is parasitic on its use by rigorous straightforward expositors.
Like you said, in the mathematical context it basically means something like “here is a fact that I have discovered to be true, and I’ll suppress the details to keep things moving along—if you wanted to work it all out, you no doubt could”; after seeing the phrase used in this way enough times by honest writers (who actually have done the work they’ve implicitly claimed to), readers might reasonably “let their guard down” when they see it in the future; so if a dishonest writer comes along and says that “it turns out that X”, these readers will take that statement both as evidence for X and for the fact that the writer has done the work to justify X; the trick is that the idea that “when writers say ‘it turns out that X’, X turns out to be true” has been baked into these readers over time.
Excellent post. I will be using the phrase “it turns out” more often than I had in the past just out of inspiration from this post ;)
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You’re right that using “it turns out” to slam-dunk an argument is sloppy. In my experience in biomedical science, the phrase is mostly used in a way that could be translated as “Neither of us has the interest to run through the entire set of studies that gave us this result, so I’ll cut to the chase and tell you our unexpected conclusion about how this phenomenon works.”
In a broader context the key to the coherence of any non-elementary set of utterances lies in transitions, and being credulous about those is a sure way to get sold the Brooklyn Bridge. Of course all of us do this all the time without realizing it, to advance our own beliefs about the state of things, and since we usually talk to people who agree with us, we don’t get called on it. Sentences are mostly just lists with descriptors attached to them, and usually the relationships are simple and non-novel enough that if you just pay attention to the nouns in a piece of prose or an utterance, you don’t lose any information. But getting people to accept a novel, specific logical relationship requires transitions, conjunctions and prepositions, the latter if you’re dealing with a physical object or process. To see sloppy transition use in the service of narrative-building, try scrolling through the post-game descriptions on ESPN during March Madness and see the narratives they invent: “The Bruins pulled ahead to a 10 point victory when player XYZ broke Gonzaga’s momentum” – or, listen to end-of-day stock reports on radio news: “Stocks down on concerns about Middle Eastern chaos” (really? You’re sure that’s why?) Post hoc propter hoc is really a special case of this fallacy.
Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness has a nice passage about the abuse of “because” in this same sense.
This turns out to be a most intriguing point. I most likely will never take “it turns out” in the same manner ever again. Well done, by you and all the friends who’ve commented.
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what is another word for “it turns out” or another phrase for it?
“As it happens” or “And you’ll find that” are close.
good article..i did a search for usage of the phrase “as it turns out” and this popped up. it gave me better insight.. basically if it warrants an explanation, dont write it.(“it turns out..”) explain it. if it’s self-explanatory or already implied or unimportant, write it, right? anyway thank you.. i read your first post too.. both are good.
I have found the phrase in non-technical usage to be increasingly a device of charlatons and pretenders. So now it says to me “Beware of the statement to follow.”
Does anyone know the origin of the phrase? Specifically, why does “turn out” imply completion or conclusion?
[…] a similar topic of sentences that direct the listener/reader, James Somers notes how “It turns out” has an interesting effect on an audience by disarmingly leaping to an assumption without any […]