> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
"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".
I do if I'm looking to pad the essay or video to make it longer.
I turns out that it's also a phrase which gets stuck on some peoples mind easily
> 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.
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.
Original submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965
And with a response from pg.
"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
[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"]
"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.'"
That was such a cool course. It seems ancient now, but I remember enjoying it at the time.