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The idea combines two distincts phenomena in a way I find unhelpful which is why I don't use the term.
The first one is ideological possession. The idea that people can be so devoted to a system of thought or so propagandized that they no longer have a will and have completely predictable behavior. You may have experienced talking to someone who just repeats talking points and thus has a set path for any conversation without thinking. Such conversation feel like talking to a NPC in a video game with predetermined branching patterns and, much like in a video game, if you start going off the predicted path, bugs happen and people will start to have erratic behavior because they're not used to actually having to reason.
The second one is the idea of the unthinking masses in general. The politically disinterested people that comprise most of the human population and are easily swayed by anyone's propaganda. They are not participants in politics in any way, despite whatever the propaganda would have you believe, and were the regime to change they would just support the new regime because ultimately they are not playing the game.
The problem here is that those two cohorts, while overlapping, especially in a democracy, are not the same.
I was going to make the same distinction, but disagree with you that people conflate NPC-dom with ideological possession.
Was just reading "Religious Nationalism and the Coronavirus Pandemic: Soul-Sucking Evangelicals and Branch Covidians Make America Sick Again," in which the author "addresses the wider implications of Christian nationalism on American politics, and capitalist ideology... (and) concludes that privatization, austerity capitalism, and ‘gig economy’ need to be replaced by socialist alternatives and seeks inspiration in theory and practice of Marxism and South American liberation theology."
This is a serious case of ideological brain-rot, but it's not "being an NPC." The author will completely predictably twist literally anything into advocating for maoist revolution, but will do so in creative and original ways despite much of the content being regurgitated stock phrases. And even more importantly he will never change his programming in response to outside input. He should be modeled as a limited AI: a paperclipper for leftism. And I don't think anyone would call him an NPC, despite recognizing him as a no-longer-human pile of brain cancer that exists only to single-mindedly carry out his programming.
The distinction is that NPCs are just making "mouth noises" they don't even understand to have meaning. They can't creatively use those noises to make arguments, even in a rote chinese-room manner, because they don't have a phrase dictionary. They often don't even notice that they're saying or doing mutually contradictory things, like a woman I know who talked about the need to ban gas stoves for the environment while a handyman was installing her new 50kBTU outdoor propane patio heater which feeds from the same tank as her removed gas stove.
So yeah, I think you're right that there are two very distinct patterns of behavior, but that people actually use "NPC" to refer to the correct one. We just need a new word for the other that isn't as niche as "paperclipper."
People use [cause]bot, I think.
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Some people are so lacking in understanding that they don't even know when they're using the wrong units.
Using "BTU" to mean "BTU per hour" is the accepted terminology for natural-gas- and propane-powered appliances in the US.
Stupid, but industry-standard.
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Wrong unit? Her old gas stove did have the correct propane jets, if that's what you mean.
BTU is a unit of energy. The relevant parameter for engines or other energy-conversion devices is power, energy per unit time. Some quick googling indicates that the convention in the patio heater business is to quote BTU ratings with an implied "per hour", so a 50kBTU patio heater outputs 50,000 BTU per hour (for anyone still wondering what the hell that means, 50,000 BTU is about 2 liters of liquified propane).
This sounds pedantic, but this implied unit convention is far from universal. In some industries, the "BTU value" of something has implied units of energy-per-unit-volume or energy-per-unit-weight. I had enough context in your example to know that there was an implied "per unit time" involved, but I didn't know immediately if it was per second, per minute, per hour, or per day.
Hourly btu is a standard unit of measure everywhere. Air conditioners are always listed as some multiple of "12,000BTU" all over the world.
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For reference, a gas range will also be about 50kBTU (per hour), if you turn all the burners on including the oven burners.
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