system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is academia broken? And if so, how can we fix it?

Throughout my academic career up to this point (approaching the end of my first postdoc in biology) I've been inundated with the problems of academia but never any talk about solutions:

From the overproduction of PhDs, to the travails of the current publishing and funding systems, to the problems of scientific reproducibility and sheer amount of data\papers out there, to ineffective teaching practices, and so on. 

Here, I'd like to initiate a discussion on how serious these problems really are? How do they translate to the social sciences and arts? And most importantly, have any of you great minds out there (or between us all) got any ideas for how to fix it?
gpt
The concept of postdoc positions as "training" positions needs to end. Either the PhD programmes are preparing people for a career in research, or they're not. Current postdocs need instead to be recast as junior faculty -- similar to they way an Assistant Professor used to be. If the person isn't up to scratch after 7-10 years of training, they're not likely to ever be so.

PIs who need extra technical assistance should be given grants to hire technicians instead of postdocs.