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."

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"

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...

> 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

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.

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>"

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

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.

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?

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.