Robert got an offer to write for MMA Payout.
The BE has provided a lot of writers a platform to get started. Ask Fightlinker.

Agree 100%. Looking for people who are “unbiased” to form a rankings panel is a fool’s errand. You cancel out bias by getting more data and weighting it, not by looking for the “good” data. Also, having experts is great, but expertise can sometimes lead you astray. The Shamrock-Diaz fight is a classic example. All of the experts picked Shamrock, but a casual fan with access to the fightfinder and wikipedia would have seen who they’ve actually beaten during the last 5 years and picked Diaz. For example, the expert remembers Baroni being a feared fighter and knocking out Dave Mene and thinks that was a significant win for Shamrock, the fan who has never seen Baroni fight looks at the fight finder and realizes that he only has a 33% chance of winning when he fights someone with a winning record, and even then it is only when he is able to KO them in the first round. I’m not saying expertise isn’t extremely important to analyzing the sport, but it doesn’t deserve our blind trust.

Here is an excerpt on the subject from an interview of Malcolm Gladwell by Bill Simmons:

Gladwell: Here’s the real question. If I was GM of the Knicks, would I be doing a better job of managing the team than Thomas? I believe, somewhat immodestly, that the answer is yes. And I say this even though it is abundantly clear that Thomas knows several thousand times more about basketball than I do. I’ve never picked up a basketball. I couldn’t diagram a play to save my life. I would put my level of basketball knowledge, among hard core fans, in the 25th percentile.

So why do I think I would be better? There’s a famous experiment done by a wonderful psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a class of American college students and asks them which city they think is bigger — San Antonio or San Diego. The students are divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college students and asks the same question. This time the class votes overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American kids. But that’s not because they know more about American geography. It’s because they know less. They’ve never heard of San Antonio. But they’ve heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more. They know all about San Antonio. They know it’s in Texas and that Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and taken forever to drive from one side of town to another — and that, and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from getting the right answer.

…

By the way, while we’re on this topic, let’s play a real world application of this. Let’s say I’m so dumb about basketball that all I know is that the best college programs in the country are Duke and UConn, and so as a GM my rule is only draft and/or trade for the first and second team players, in any given year, from those two schools. So I fire all my scouts. I disband my front office, and basically say that I cede my basketball judgment to Jim Calhoun and Mike K. What’s my team? It’s some combination of Elton Brand, Emeka Okafor, Ben Gordon, Luol Deng, Shane Battier, Mike Dunleavy, Rip Hamilton, Corey Maggette, Jay Williams, Caron Butler, Donyell Marshall and Grant Hill — which is a really wonderful team. Now, of course, in the real world I couldn’t get all those people, because lots of them were really high draft picks. But let’s say I got Brand in a trade, after Chicago soured on him, and I was lucky enough to be in the lottery for Okafor. Maggette was a 13; Hamilton and Deng were 7s; and Butler was a 10 — so at least some of them are doable, particularly since in off-years for Duke and UConn I can trade down and stockpile picks. Battier I wine and dine in the free agent market, because who wants to be stuck in Memphis? Ditto for Gordon, who, it seems, Chicago is thinking of moving anyway. Is that the best team in the league? No. It is better than the Knicks? Absolutely. The point is that clinging to a very simple rule of thumb here — that doesn’t require knowing much about basketball — can leave you looking pretty smart.

Rankings in MMA are for entertainment value only. No one except for WAMMA actually expects them to affect matchmaking for fighter contracts they are just for fan entertainment and getting a overview of which guys stand where. I wouldn’t crown a NCAA football champion using the BE style rankings but for telling which guys the MMA media think stand where it works very well. What really gets me is all the complaining that goes on about them, people really take this crap seriously for some reason. I would expect WAMMA to take it seriously they are actually trying to make a buck off of it but why do other sites and fans take rankings so seriously?

The last point I’d like to make is that no fighter is making any money off of our rankings.

Well fuck, that sounds like a good start for objectivity to me.

It isn’t different at all. It basically putting all the credibility in the people instead of a whole site.

 The more imput the smoother the edges. Statistically speaking the more data the better the results, of course a statistical analysis of people’s opinion is still completly subjective.

I’ve been making efforts to be a lot more brief lately. The quality commentators that now speak as I do save me a lot of time, which I largely use to get drunk and go to Nuggets games. It’s great.