Researchers at Rethink Priorities have attempted to measure the moral weight of suffering across different animal species—essentially estimating how much a bee's pain matters relative to a human's. But according to a new critique on LessWrong, the project may be systematically overestimating the moral standing of small animals. The analysis identifies two key problems: first, the model double-counts correlated behavioral traits—anxiety, fear, and panic in a pig are really just different expressions of the same thing, but they're scored as separate evidence. Second, the fact that tiny creatures like black soldier flies score positively on numerous proxies suggests those proxies might not actually be good indicators of consciousness at all—a classic Bayesian error of updating confidence in a flawed test rather than the likelihood of the thing being tested.

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