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.
> 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".
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!
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.