And this is scary. At least with "high-energy experiments" (like the one that discover Higgs) in colliders, a lot depends on so-called triggers, which dismiss 99.9% of information produced in a collision "on the spot", so that this information is never recorded and analyzed.

They have to: there is way too much information produced. So the triggers try to identify "trivial" events and dismiss them immediately, relaying only the ones that are may be somewhat unusual/unexpected.

Essentially, the triggers are computers with highly specialized programs. Very smart people work on this, and supposedly they figure out problems with triggers before they affect the results of experiments...