Image: 3 panel stick figure comic. The first two is of the same person smiling. The last one if the person with a troubled face and has "realization" written above.
The last time this happened was when I realized that people ask me questions about how I know things to start a conversation, not because they want to know how I know things. Example: https://lemmy.autism.place/post/116248
I speculate that since this is automatically understood by NTs, when we don't follow through on the small talk prompt, they either think:
we dont like small talk, so we're shutting it down
we are not interested in chatting up this specific person at the moment
it would be insulting to assume or point out that we didn't understand the small talk prompt
we will go off on a rant about implied social norms that frustrate us, and they don't feel like dealing with that
our autism wouldn't let us understand it anyway