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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

It's not helpful to the kind of person whose recreational weekend reading includes MIT Sloan analyses. Most Americans don't have what I suspect you'd consider a basic level of financial literacy (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/your-money/americans-fina...), and do need to be informed about things like the compounding effect of savings or the benefit of diversification.

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Its also not helpful to the person who doesn't. How much to save, when to save, how to diversify, what rate of exposure to equities is too much, how much to with draw in retirement? And thats just questions on the answer it gave. But what about if I have a loan bearing interest? What about if I'm self employed? What if my appetite for risk is less, greater? What if I want to retire early?

It gave vague unspecified advice that isn't actionable and didn't provide any weight to tradeoffs.

Sometimes I wonder if some folks have even used AI. Maybe this is your chance: AI will easily take you down a rabbit hole of financial advice beyond your ability to understand it, including up to date research. Far beyond what 99% of people would find useful or interesting.

Why do you think it gave vague advice? The paper has a sample of provided advice in Table 1 that seems pretty specific. (I attempted to quote it, but it triggers the HN spam filters, presumably because it's a chunk of LLM generated text substantially larger than my actual comment.)

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