A bit about me: I'm currently a data scientist and instructor at Metis.

I've also done lot of other stuff! The best place to check all of that out is my website: www.ritabiagioli.com

I'm going to tell you what it means, but, really, I can't tell you why I picked it for my GitHub username. It was a reflection what I was working on and thinking about while I was also learning to code and diving into the world of data.

To start: māyā means illusion in Sanskrit.

I know, sounds like I'm gonna go get a tattoo, right? But I actually studied Sanskrit for five years. Here, I'm pulling from the meaning in advaita vedānta which comes out of texts called upanisads. The basic premise is that there is some base substance underlying the universe and what we perceive the world to be is illusory. The classic example goes like this: you see a snake, but is it a snake? or is it really a stick? Is your mind interpreting stick as snake? And how do we tease that out?

So that's that part. The rest of it comes from... get ready... Freud. Freud's treatise on religion is called The Future of an Illusion, and Freud is an extremely gifted writer and theorist in general, and wrote on many subjects other than those for which he is maligned. Reading him doesn't mean we have to, you know, take stock in everything he said. In this work, Freud basically trashes religion. He posits that it's socially and psychologically constructed. But there's this one sentence at the end that always gets me: “I know how difficult it is to avoid illusions; perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too.” Interestingly, this is what a lot of religious texts (in multiple religions) do at the end: it's basically saying hey, if I messed up, and maybe I did, that's okay, right? So Freud is saying I think this is all nonsense, but hey, maybe I'm full of nonsense. And that, in my mind, connects back to this notion of the world as illusory.

What is real? Is there a real? How do we go about figuring out what is real? And even if we try to do that, how can we, as people biased by being people, even evaluate our own investigation?

Okay -- get ready -- because I'm gonna connect it all back. As data scientists, we find trends and patterns, but we can't possibly find all the trends and patterns or be correct all the time without having all possible information. Of course, we can use statistics to measure how confident we are in our assertions, but the truth is that even numbers can be subjective and there is an art to interpreting what they're telling us. We come up with our best data-driven analyses, but it's possible, too, that we -- for whatever reason -- are digging into illusion. We've mistook a stick for a snake. It's the project and goal of the data scientist to try to see sticks for sticks, keeping in mind that sometimes it's easy to see a snake by mistake.

Phew! Well, that's the explanation! And this is the username I somehow chose.