The primary similarity is that autistic humans, while exhibiting the same range of intelligence as humans in general, tend to be much worse at understanding the subtleties of social interaction. Most humans would consider the type of information that I'm giving you to be very basic, or even instinctive, but it's not terribly uncommon for autistic humans to reach adulthood with little to no functional understanding of one or more subsets of that information. (From what I've read, and from my own experience, most autistics do seem to have instincts relating to socialization, but those instincts tend to be nonstandard enough to be useless or even counterproductive.) There are a few other similarities, too - autistics tend to take most communication very literally, for example, and we tend to have 'special interests' that are similar in some ways to your interest in paperclips. (My fondness for multiples of the number three is similarly arbitrary, and appears to be a similarly intrinsic part of my selfhood, though I have other values that are more important than that one, so I'm not much inclined to spend my time producing instances of the numbers 9 and 81, even though I find them particularly pleasing.)

Appearing autistic is useful in this context because it will - in this context - result in you getting useful information. It's also useful to me and others because the questions that you're asking involve information that we tend to take for granted, and explicitly discussing that information or seeing it discussed explicitly allows us to better understand it and possibly notice irrationalities in how we've been using it. However, in other contexts, failing to adhere to the social expectations of others tends to have rather less useful results, for a variety of reasons, most of which are complex and some of which are fairly arbitrary.