Interestingly, an almost identical proverb exists in Polish ("him" is replaced with "swine" canonically, but it's often replaced by a person's name). It's used to suggest that someone is either too dumb or too self-assured to accept criticism. Is the intended meaning similar in Greek?
It's hypothesising a phenomenon. I'm looking for a measure. The phenomenon is intuitively correct, but also suspiciously attractive. Sort of like the bullshit-job (or corrupt-bureaucrat) hypotheses, where every job or public official one doesn't like can be conveniently terms bullshit absent any rigour.
Thank you for the Berry post. Has anyone tried to test his hypothesis? My gut feeling is it will check out, particularly for AI chats. Input measure is easy–you have time and text quantity. But output value is more difficult...I'm wondering if there is a good case where this could be observed.
I'm doing a PhD in sociology of work (I have a background in software development) and want to do such a study on software development with AI, but as you say it's quite hard to find a good setting, because it's hard to operationalise quality.
What if you looked at scheduling? Like, an assistant or agent scheduling a calendar something?
It's atomic, and one can't usually add value beyond a low threshold. If we're seeing more words–or tokens–used over time for a task which one cannot reasonably argue has gotten more complicated in that time, it would be direct evidence of involution. If you can relate that to competition for VC dollars or customers, that takes you over to Neijuan.
The usage of Neijuan as I understand it isn't about a complete lack of results, Chinese test scores are really good, but there's only 10% in the top 10% so competing even harder just means everyone is miserable competing for the same number of spots. Same for production if it's driving prices down, you did produce more, but so did everyone else and the end result is a race to the bottom.
> In western thought, this is mostly related to the concept of involution.
> The most famous study is on Javanese farming:
I had thought that 'involution' was just a literal translation of the Chinese term, since I've never heard of the English word in this sense. To me it would just mean "turning inside out".
But things appear to be the other way around; that paper was apparently titled Agricultural involution in 1963.
It's very striking that the blog post mentions the paper, names the phenomenon "involution", and then comments that it's similar to "what Chinese social theory calls 内卷", while completely ignoring the fact that 内卷 is transparently a calque of "involution".
For context, this article has probably been posted as it is linked to by the "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?" blog post [1] currently being discussed [2].
It's not even a person, it's a system. There's a million people behind you who will take your job if you don't grind, and that goes for your boss as well.
Definitely a concept that should be diffused and discussed in France, especially in preparation of next elections for which anti-capitalist sentiment is quite high.
This came up a lot recently in regards to competition in the solar and EV spaces.
And yet, the competition generated cheap power and transport that was clean and didn't rely on foreign actors. Making life easier for many Chinese people.
It felt like the manufacturers had learned too much from western corporate media which is always moaning about competition and horrified at the thought of things getting cheaper if that would affect the sacred next quarter profits.
>When capital owners are driven by competition they must work increasingly more for little or no marginal gain despite falling prices for consumers so price fixing or 'price leadership' becomes impossible.
A lot of the people in the comments here seem to miss that this explicitly isn't about workers or feeling overworked and if anything should make the average consumer better off.
The next sentence is "On a personal level, neijuan reflects a life of being overworked, stressed, anxious and feeling trapped, a lifestyle where many face the negative effects of living a very competitive life for nothing."
Overworked Chinese workers have been making western consumers better off for more than two decades now. Chinese domestic consumption is very low even among developing countries, negligible compared to its gigantic export.
Upon joining WTO one prerequisite is 5 days-8 hours work week, while presently in China you often find 996 schedule instead, with factory workers even worse with 12 hour shifts and 2 days off a month.
It is simply sweatshop in the 21st century again, a hallmark of Neijuan.
I'm not saying workers aren't necessarily overworked etc. I'm just saying that's not what this word and concept is about. This concept is about capital owners.
It would hardly have become a popular slang term on the Chinese internet if it were only about the worries of a small minority of capital owners. Any kind of excessive competition dynamics may be described as neijuan. I would like to give you some social media usage examples, but Weibo is censoring the #内卷# hashtag. In any case, the Wikipedia article has examples involving students competing in exams and graduates competing on the job market, among others.
Like other comments on OP have pointed out, the term at this point is vague and used for various reasons.
But given the term's emergence in a country with a communist government, and the origin described by wikipedia, I think what I'm saying is more aligned with the term's origin.
Whatever the term means on Chinese internet sounds like standard (I'm sure partially valid) doomerism. I can accept they use it to describe that.
No, sociologists use the term involution to describe Asian rice farmers. These farmers poured an increasing amount of labor into their tiny patches of land to extract the last bit of productivity, yet despite their hard work, they remained poor.
The younger Chinese generation views their economic situation much in the same way: forced to overwork, with surprisingly little personal gain. They are typically not capital owners at all.
Note: the term is sometimes translated to “内旋” (“inward spiral”) in Japanese, which I believe conveys the nuance better.
> Goldenweiser uses Māori decorative art as an example. The development of art was done within the framework of already existing patterns. The final pieces were elaborate and complicated in appearance but fundamentally the same as existing art.
Is there a way to only apply this to corporate profits but not the labor market? A world where production and labor demand is constantly growing but returns stay flat would be a great one.
JumpCrisscross | 18 hours ago
hirako2000 | 18 hours ago
But if you feel like it's raining, it probably is.
netmare | 18 hours ago
klibertp | 17 hours ago
netmare | 9 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 17 hours ago
It's hypothesising a phenomenon. I'm looking for a measure. The phenomenon is intuitively correct, but also suspiciously attractive. Sort of like the bullshit-job (or corrupt-bureaucrat) hypotheses, where every job or public official one doesn't like can be conveniently terms bullshit absent any rigour.
lensecat | 18 hours ago
The most famous study is on Javanese farming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Involution
In terms of software development, here's a blogpost from 2025, by a professor at Sussex Uni: https://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2025/07/involution-and-artifici...
There are also some studies in China on the concept but I'm less familiar with that literature.
JumpCrisscross | 18 hours ago
lensecat | 17 hours ago
I have been thinking of measuring it along these lines perhaps... https://www.gitclear.com/the_ai_code_quality_maintainability...
But they have a closed sourced software so I would have to find or create an open one in that case.
Happy to hear if you have any ideas on study design!
JumpCrisscross | 17 hours ago
It's atomic, and one can't usually add value beyond a low threshold. If we're seeing more words–or tokens–used over time for a task which one cannot reasonably argue has gotten more complicated in that time, it would be direct evidence of involution. If you can relate that to competition for VC dollars or customers, that takes you over to Neijuan.
nixon_why69 | 16 hours ago
torginus | 16 hours ago
thaumasiotes | 14 hours ago
> The most famous study is on Javanese farming:
I had thought that 'involution' was just a literal translation of the Chinese term, since I've never heard of the English word in this sense. To me it would just mean "turning inside out".
But things appear to be the other way around; that paper was apparently titled Agricultural involution in 1963.
It's very striking that the blog post mentions the paper, names the phenomenon "involution", and then comments that it's similar to "what Chinese social theory calls 内卷", while completely ignoring the fact that 内卷 is transparently a calque of "involution".
内 "inside", 卷 "roll".
nixon_why69 | 16 hours ago
anovikov | 18 hours ago
jamessb | 17 hours ago
[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229
mark_something | 17 hours ago
torginus | 16 hours ago
yorwba | 14 hours ago
nixon_why69 | 13 hours ago
threecheese | 10 hours ago
0wis | 15 hours ago
ZeroGravitas | 15 hours ago
And yet, the competition generated cheap power and transport that was clean and didn't rely on foreign actors. Making life easier for many Chinese people.
It felt like the manufacturers had learned too much from western corporate media which is always moaning about competition and horrified at the thought of things getting cheaper if that would affect the sacred next quarter profits.
api | 15 hours ago
sunrunner | 14 hours ago
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Verschlimmbesserung
stronglikedan | 10 hours ago
lopsotronic | 10 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Arch...
gcanyon | 15 hours ago
myself248 | 14 hours ago
tantalor | 14 hours ago
kjshsh123 | 15 hours ago
A lot of the people in the comments here seem to miss that this explicitly isn't about workers or feeling overworked and if anything should make the average consumer better off.
matheusmoreira | 14 hours ago
kjshsh123 | 8 hours ago
yorwba | 14 hours ago
kjshsh123 | 8 hours ago
handle584 | 12 hours ago
Upon joining WTO one prerequisite is 5 days-8 hours work week, while presently in China you often find 996 schedule instead, with factory workers even worse with 12 hour shifts and 2 days off a month.
It is simply sweatshop in the 21st century again, a hallmark of Neijuan.
kjshsh123 | 8 hours ago
yorwba | 7 hours ago
kjshsh123 | 6 hours ago
But given the term's emergence in a country with a communist government, and the origin described by wikipedia, I think what I'm saying is more aligned with the term's origin.
Whatever the term means on Chinese internet sounds like standard (I'm sure partially valid) doomerism. I can accept they use it to describe that.
cloudbonsai | 5 hours ago
The younger Chinese generation views their economic situation much in the same way: forced to overwork, with surprisingly little personal gain. They are typically not capital owners at all.
Note: the term is sometimes translated to “内旋” (“inward spiral”) in Japanese, which I believe conveys the nuance better.
tantalor | 14 hours ago
Jeez, what an asshole.
tancop | 14 hours ago
mikhael28 | 10 hours ago
simplisticelk | 9 hours ago
mikhael28 | 8 hours ago
mcphage | 7 hours ago