The journal of Basic and Applied Social Pychology banned the

p

-value in 2015, after Trafimow (2014) had explained in an editorial a year earlier that inferential statistics were no longer required. In the 2014 editorial, Trafimow notes how: “

The null hypothesis significance procedure has been shown to be logically invalid and to provide little information about the actual likelihood of either the null or experimental hypothesis (see Trafimow, 2003; Trafimow & Rice, 2009)

”. The goal of this blog post is to explain why the arguments put forward in Trafimow & Rice (2009) are incorrect. Their simulations illustrate how meaningless questions provide meaningless answers, but they do not reveal a problem with

p

-values. Editors can do with their journal as they like – even ban

p

-values. But if the simulations upon which such a ban is based are meaningless, the ban itself becomes meaningless.