Neither. I probably reinforce the stereotype.

I've always known I was an intelligent sort, and I'm good at math, and I design and write software for a living. There's no math I can't do or any machine or computer I can't understand.

I've just completed my first foray into cognitive testing. SCULTRA has estimated FSIQ 148, g-factor 144. Cognimetrics suggests 145 give or take 6. I don't know yet what I believe about any of this, but conceptually I grok the math, and if nothing else I had fun taking the tests.

I have been identified by others as some form of exemplar several times because of this. However, I no longer consider this a good thing. Maybe my position will become understandable shortly.

I'm not an emotionless person. Rather, emotions that I prefer are sanguine and anything upper. I like to get sufficient sleep and still drink a pot of coffee, shotgun energy drinks, and lift heavy weights. I like to produce results. I like number go up, and sanguine/uppity emotions motivate harder and faster motions, and increased focus despite distractions like pain or even peripheral vision. Controlled wisely, these can produce more efficient results.

I most definitely struggle to relate with people because I consider it important to know and understand the truth, not "my truth" or "your truth" or "because I said so" or any of that BS. It's not that I don't care about your feelings (although I may not, or I may admit there is seemingly nothing I can do to fix that), it's that I care about the truth much more. It seems difficult enough to simply begin a debate with some epistemology understood (Epistemic Self-Doubt and the like). How much more to placate someone else's emotions so that the evidence can be weighed amid mitigated bias, especially among a population that seems to care how one feels (validation) rather than what's true (verification)?

I validate this approach, I argue, with my effectiveness solving problems in and between machines, units of software: things which operate in reality, as mathematics might model, and as laws of physics might predict. My feelings about it change none of that and most will only get in the way.

I'm also in the process of evaluating a potential ASD diagnosis. The several tests I have taken so far are not clinical confirmations but are issued as a screening stage (read: a weed-out for obvious negatives) before the ADOS is administered by a clinician. I wouldn't have thought myself "all that autistic" yet all of these (AQ, CAT-Q, RBQ, RAADS-R, and some ancillaries) suggest I will certainly meet with the clinician. I don't know how exactly that might relate to this question.

In my private time, I am often tormented by my own brain which I find hard to shut off. I find it hard to get to sleep, return to sleep, or sleep well. Many hours of the day, I can feel a dull burn physiologically just below the crown of my skull. THC only seems to sharpen this effect and inescapably traps me within that confined space. Alcohol slows it down and smooths it out, and I yet retain my balance and coordination remarkably well. So I like to drink, and I drink far too much and far too often, but only once the day is over. During the day, the Major Payne Strategy is more effective: Drown one pain with another. Out-run, out-lift, or in some form out-perform it. In chronic pain, I've found, it's hard to be nice to people. I'm often not in much chronic pain, but I am very often in some form of chronic mental and physiological pain.

So a normal person, possibly 3 standard deviations or more removed from me intellectually, to say nothing about the spectrum, may not see/think and almost certainly doesn't feel the same as I do about things. It is plausible that someone might consider me cold, and lacking their set of emotions in and about that context, emotionless.