argues that political events are less significant than, and downstream of, technological and intellectual events

We should mark history by technological progress, changing of the socioeconomic landscape, and the improvement of the human condition, rather than major battles and political events (I mostly agree, think it should be 70-30)

I really like this reframe and think it encourages a really good ideological/religious change, where we worship innovators rather than warriors

imo tech etc set the landscape of how easy/hard/likely things are, but political action decides which path we take through that landscape, and there's a ton of variance and path dependence determined at this level

I guess for the highest level arc of history maybe this is less true, but it definitely matters a lot on human-lifetime scales. Unclear if global dictatorship is a fixed point or not. Also nuclear war or deterrence was at the political level and could have significantly slowed progress, not to mention the huge harm at short and medium levels of history

If your frame is just "will the persist march of knowledge accumulation continue" then yeah political events don't matter, but that's not what they're arguing, I think they're saying even from a human suffering/prosperity question politics doesn't matter much (or is really overrated). That i agree with but politics is still really important for that (but yeah perhaps less important)