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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

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"

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Right, to tease apart some other subtext it might be used with:

1. This stuff is is tricky, it's normal to guess wrong and need to revise our understanding.

2. We are both on the same side, facing the challenge.

3. The potential for surprise makes this stuff interesting.

There's a collection of Ben Goldacre's articles compiled in a book called "I Think You'll Find It's A Bit More Complicated Than That", which is a phrase I want to put on a T-shirt, or possibly my Teams background at work.

This should be called “The Engineer’s Credo”

That’s exactly how I try to use the phrase, usually when pushing back against falsified ideas I likely accepted to some degree myself and later looked into. Like the whole thing with alpha/beta male wolf mythology vs real observation in the wild.

Incidentally, just yesterday I learned the sun is “white”, because I was looking at why veins are bluish (despite low oxygen blood actually being just dark red) and looking into light scattering effects that are the cause.

I don't see the example would be different in conveying the same meaning if you omit the whole "85 turns out that".

if you include "it turns out that", you're implying that maybe you thought the same as them in the past, but looked into it, and learned something interesting. if you omit that, you're just correcting them and subtly implying that they aren't as smart as you (e.g. it was obvious to you)

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