I’m an Aspie, and I’m the nicest asshole you’ll ever meet. I’m irritable, plainspoken, tactless, and often don’t care about the hate and discontent I leave in the wake of my passing through. Yet, that is because it takes enough conscious effort for me to remember how neuro-typicals think (like not wearing their heart out on their sleeve for the world to see by allowing the frustration they constantly feel to come out in the form of snark…) that I cannot always remember that and still form sentences; I can be nice, and I can communicate, but I can’t always do both at the same time. In computer terms, I am a Linux box in a Windows world, and just as WINE allows Linux to do many of the things Windows does but has limits, my brain works differently from most people’s and many things that normal people understand intuitively, I must translate into my own terms.
I sometimes get a little derogatory when people don’t know what I consider to be “basic information”, like the fact that total circuit resistance drops instead of rises when you wire loads in parallel, or that the torque curve of a car engine is basically a graph of it’s volumetric efficiency throughout the RPM range. (The migraines don’t exactly help my crankiness either, but that’s a separate issue.)
But I try to be helpful, try to enlighten those seeking wisdom in areas where I have the knowledge to do so, and can be surprisingly sympathetic considering I sometimes come across as cold-hearted or outright mean. I am quite generous when I have the means to be, and generally just not the guy you’d think I am from the bad first impression I sometimes leave.
Now that we’ve had the setup, here is my answer.
Thing is, Autism affects personalities, but it doesn’t completely replace them. We don’t all come from the same cookie cutter. We share some common traits, but each of us has our own different mix of symptoms; different enough to make highly-trained medical specialists have difficulty identifying and treating us.
Autistic people don’t have the whole “theory of mind” that normal people do. Some of us have it in a limited sense while some lack it completely. Personally, I am a bit judgmental myself as a result, and I imagine that is what your friend has issues with too. When I slow down and think about it, I can often put myself in another person’s shoes… but not always, and definitely not something I can do without some effort. Some people are utterly incapable of it at all.
But let us test your theory of mind for a moment. Imagine that everyone in the world was like you. Everyone had the same knowledge, hobbies, beliefs, etcetera. How would you react when someone does something you wouldn’t do? Would you think that they are stupid for not knowing stuff that you know, feeling that they should know because they are like you? In other words, would you act like your friend?