The Power of Plato's Dialogue

Greg Bear: If this form of philosophizing or transmitting philosophy is so powerful, why have so few people been able to pull it off? He says Plato recognized this was the precondition of all thinking and didn't want to cover it over with just a sort of a treatise form. Bear: It's difficult to write a dialogue where you don't find up the interlocutors as a straw man. But I think that there's a more natural human tendency to look for answers.