>In his discussions of such matters as "What is justice?" or "What is virtue?" he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about.

See also: Jordan Peterson et al. Our tendency to favor logical correctness over empirical correctness is one of our most dangerous cognitive biases. It's very easy to convince people to believe arguments that are perfectly logically consistent in their own self-constructed reality but have no bearing on empirical reality, over arguments that conform to empirical reality but may not have perfect logical consistency. Empirical reality is messy and it's difficult to construct a perfectly consistent set of axioms around it; constructed reality is neat and thus trivial to construct sets of perfectly consistent axioms around it.