Comment by Truth on Lives of the Cambridge polymath geniuses · 2022-02-06T05:45:40.488Z · LW · GW

Fully agree. Just created this account to chime in on how strange it appears for the author to describe someone as a ’polymath genius’ in biochemistry and sinology and to then claim that said individual was supposedly duped on a subject concerning biochemistry by a group of humans in the culture he most intensively studied.

It’s far more likely that the author himself was duped on this matter. (Along with the subset of the population less well informed than Needham, which is to say nearly everyone that superficially looked into the issue from a pro-American perspective )