Dispatching Parallel Investigations

Overview

You delegate investigations to specialized agents with isolated context. By precisely crafting their instructions, you keep each focused and preserve your own context for synthesis. They never inherit your session history — you construct exactly what each needs.

When you have multiple independent investigations (different datasets, different sub-topics in a literature survey, different pre-specified robustness checks), running them sequentially wastes time. Each is independent and can run in parallel.

Core principle: One agent per independent investigation. Let them run concurrently, then synthesize.

The Pre-Registration Guard (read first)

Parallelism multiplies researcher degrees of freedom. If you dispatch 20 specifications and report the one that "works," you have p-hacked at scale — parallelism made it faster, not more honest.

• Pre-specified robustness checks are fine in parallel — they were registered, and you report all of them.
• Exploratory analyses are fine in parallel — as long as every result is labeled exploratory and none is promoted to confirmatory.
• Never use parallel dispatch to search the specification space for significance and report the survivor.

When to Use