This paper advances a critical but overlooked distinction in scientific methodology: while statistical approaches focus primarily on high-probability events, the most transformative scientific discoveries emerge from low-probability phenomena that are systematically neglected by current academic structures. Our core innovation lies not merely in demonstrating that high-probability events can be false—as established by Ioannidis—but more importantly, in revealing how low-probability events of genuine scientific importance are marginalized by probability-centric evaluation systems. Consider that the emergence of plant and animal life in nature represents quintessential low-probability events, yet these "statistical outliers" fundamentally shaped our biosphere. Similarly, the human body's remarkable self-healing mechanisms operate through low-probability biological processes that, despite extensive high-probability experimental approaches, remain impossible to replicate artificially in laboratories. Market economies succeed precisely because they create conditions enabling low-probability innovations to flourish through spontaneous order rather than centralized planning. This framework addresses urgent problems in contemporary academia: graduate students who should primarily focus on rigorous coursework to elevate their theoretical foundations are instead pressured into laboratories pursuing "innovation," resulting in the paradoxical phenomenon where "teaching standards continuously decline while SCI publication prestige continuously rises." Statistical methods incorrectly suggest that innovation is commonplace—that every master's and doctoral student can produce multiple high-impact publications, and even undergraduates routinely publish in SCI journals. This generates the false conclusion that "innovation is easy and achievable by everyone," when authentic innovation remains a rare, serendipitous event. Realistically, perhaps 5% of published SCI papers contain genuine innovation, despite universal claims of novelty, yet statistical methodologies cannot distinguish authentic breakthroughs from incremental modifications. The fundamental issue is that statistical methods' prerequisite assumptions—particularly the ability to identify true innovation—simply do not exist in practice, creating a measurement problem that undermines the entire evaluation system and perpetuates the very biases our research exposes.
Yue Liu (Wed,) studied this question.