Do You Need To Be Taboo These Days To Really Sell Your (Non-Fiction) Work?
Interesting point from Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex in a really smart longread on the "Intellectual Dark Web" (stupid fucking name, though I like and respect the guy who came up with it):

I'd go further and say that more taboo ideas are more likely to generate famous spokespeople. If you can't think of any modern feminists with star power, you can always go back to the 1970s and find people like Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin - who made waves by being at least as outrageous then as the IDW is now. If Ta-Nehisi Coates isn't famous enough for you, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X certainly will be. Malcolm X didn't get more famous than Ta-Nehisi Coates by being more well-liked, he got famous by being as controversial and threatening and feared as Coates is accepted.

He continues:

I think there's definitely a phenomenon to be explained, and I think "crowded field" is a big part of it. In my own experience, my blog posts promoting orthodox opinions are generally ignored; my blog posts promoting controversial opinions go viral and win me lots of praise. I assume this is because my orthodox blog posts are trying to outcompete the people at Vox (highly-polished, Ivy-League-educated mutants grown in vats by a DARPA project to engineer the perfect thinkpiece writer), and my controversial blog posts are trying to outcompete three randos with blogs that consistently confuse "there" and "their". Winning one competition is much easier than winning the other - and the prize for winning either is "the attention of about 50% of the population."