> Practicality results in missed data points,  and student observers have incentive to report what is expected and assume outliers are 'mistakes'. 

In other fields, "outliers" are what's really interesting.  "How'd THAT happen?" one asks, and sometimes careers are made on chasing down that "how".

Saying "OUT, Liar!" to outliers is the sign of an incurious mind.

As for "noise", one need no further than the Holmdel, NJ Works and the Bell Labs researchers Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson, who saw unacceptable noise levels in a microwave frequency range dish/horn left over from the "Echo" project satellite program that they wanted to repurpose for radio astronomy.  Despite 4 solid years of work in the 1960s, they could not eliminate the noise, which made it a less-than excellent radio telescope.  They figured out the source of the noise eventually, it was the then-unproven "cosmic background radiation".  Proof of the "big bang", and at a very high level of conformity with theory.  This earned them the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics, even though Wilson doubted the "big bang" view, in favor of the "steady state" theory of the universe.

Sometimes, the "noise" is the only interesting data.

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