Comment by gilesbowkett235
16 years ago
I think he wasn't calling the phrase itself deceptive. I think he's saying that you use it in an undisciplined way. From the final paragraph:
[the phrase is] useful in circumstances where you don’t have any substantive path from X to Y.
Nothing personal, but I think he's onto something. Especially if you take a more generous outlook and expand it to "circumstances where you don't demonstrate any substantive path from X to Y." (Even if somebody fails to demonstrate a substantive path, the path might still exist.)
Re: patterns, there was a blogger who did some kind of screen-scraping, machine learning, NLP analysis of my blog and claimed their analysis proved I was really a bot. I would take that kind of thing with a grain of salt.
I think that it serves to make reading an essay more fluid, as you can crop a lot of unnecessary information this way. If every "it turns out" was to follow the path that came to the conclusion, then there'd be a lot of extra detail that would divert the reader from the intended direction, without providing necessary information.
And if the exact path is illuminating in some way, but distracting from the original intent, then it would serve to put the explanation in a footnote.