Wiio's Laws. This is the big one. This is the one that says it all. Do read them. Apparently, this doesn't happen to everyone, but after reading that page I started seeing Wiio's laws everywhere.
Regarding Wiio's Laws: The author of that piece seems to be holding an unreasonable standard for what counts as "successful" communication. Human communication is generally far from perfect, but it's usually good enough.
-Peter de Blanc
Miscommunication is something we talk about Less Wrong a lot, what with the illusion of transparency, the double illusion of transparency, and the 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong sequence and better disagreement and levels of communication and mental metadata and this (not to mention Robin Hanson's Disagreement is Near/Far Bias). I thought about writing a new top-level post about it with some of the links I've found, but I figure they say all I could have said.
Here you go: