5 ms·
Neijuan
- JumpCrisscross 2mo agoHas it been measured? Or is this more of a qualitative critique?
- hirako2000 2mo agoIt isn't pointing at particular system to blame. But if you feel like it's raining, it probably is.
- netmare 2mo agoThere's a Greek proverb disputing the latter: they are spitting on him and he thinks it's raining.
- klibertp 2mo agoInterestingly, 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?
- netmare 2mo agoYup, it's exactly the same.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> It isn't pointing at particular system to blame 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 2mo agoIn western thought, this is mostly related to the concept of involution. The most famous study is on Javanese farming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Involution 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-artificial-intelligence.html 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 2mo agoThank 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.
- lensecat 2mo agoI'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. I have been thinking of measuring it along these lines perhaps... https://www.gitclear.com/the_ai_code_quality_maintainability_gap 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 2mo agoWhat 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.
- nixon_why69 2mo agoIn China, one could look at hours of homework, work hours etc and conclude there's a reason the term was coined.
- anovikov 2mo ago"1920s style crisis of overproduction with Chinese characteristics"
- DoggoMz 2mo ago[flagged]
- jamessb 2mo agoFor 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]. [1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/ https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/ [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229
- mark_something 2mo agoIME, when words like this become common, it allows people to identify them more easily, so it's a good thing to introduce such words.
- torginus 2mo agoWhat I love about the Chinese is how incredibly aware and self-reflective they are about the wheel of suffering they are building for themselves.
- yorwba 2mo agoThe people building the wheel of suffering and the ones complaining about it may both be Chinese, but they're not the same person.
- nixon_why69 2mo agoIt'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.
- anovikov 2mo agoI wonder what happens to China when this factor disappears. China workforce peaked in 2016, and city workforce will peak in the next few years. With the economy still growing, acute labor shortage is less than 10 years away.
- threecheese 2mo agoDon’t forget General Tso!
- wangxili1997 2mo ago[flagged]
- 0wis 2mo agoDefinitely a concept that should be diffused and discussed in France, especially in preparation of next elections for which anti-capitalist sentiment is quite high.
- ZeroGravitas 2mo agoThis 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.
- api 2mo agoWow it’s a proper word for software engineering and platform complexity over the last 30 years.
- sunrunner 2mo agoI usually reach for Verschlimmbesserung [1] to describe that. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Verschlimmbesserung https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Verschlimmbesserung
- stronglikedan 2mo agoAh, good old v17g!
- lopsotronic 2mo agoFor docs, see also "Darwin Information Typing Architecture" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Arch...
- gcanyon 2mo agoI'm surprised that article doesn't reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
- kjshsh123 2mo ago>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.
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoWhat's the point of serving this average consumer if we won't end up better off though?
- kjshsh123 2mo agoWe are all consumers.
- yorwba 2mo agoThe 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."
- kjshsh123 2mo agoYes, for capital owners.
- handle584 2mo agoOverworked 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.
- 2mo ago
- tantalor 2mo ago> 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. Jeez, what an asshole.
- tancop 2mo agoIs 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.
- mikhael28 2mo agoNeijuan as a word has transcended itself; it now means many different things, to many different people, in many different contexts.
- simplisticelk 2mo agoSemantic diffusion strikes again.
- mikhael28 2mo agoLearned a new expression today, thanks for the comment.
- mcphage 2mo agoThis reminds me of Santayana's quote: “Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
- rye_pan 2mo agoInvolution is competition over a fixed pie. If the labor pool really shrinks, the pressure eases without anyone deciding to stop.