「実はこうだった」— 2010年に語られた、エンジニアが直面する“意外な真実”

2010年に投稿されたこのトピックは、「It turns out（結局、〜だということがわかった）」という言葉をテーマに、事前の予想とは異なる結論や、実際に手を動かして初めて得られる本質的な気づきについて示唆しています。本文は含まれていませんが、開発現場でよく遭遇する「蓋を開けてみたら想定とは違った」という、エンジニアなら誰もが共感する現象を象徴する非常に興味深いタイトルです。

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

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."

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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1bX3F7uTrg)

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"

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>"

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... (https://web.archive.org/web/20100309032112/http://blog.ethanjfast.com/2010/03/as-it-turns-out-is-quite-innocuous/)

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 (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.

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.

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=43566675)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939439 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42939439)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697283 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697283)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39754588 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39754588)

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?