What it is
Socrates never wrote anything down. Everything we know about his philosophy comes through his student Plato, which leaves historians with “the Socratic problem”: what did Socrates actually believe, and what did Plato put in his mouth?
David Deutsch draws the general lesson. Communicating new ideas, even simple ones like directions, depends on guesswork on both sides and is inherently fallible. Neither intelligence nor devotion protects against it. The default assumption should be that misunderstandings are everywhere.
How it shows up for me
It makes me humbler about being misread and about misreading others. When something I said lands wrong, I assume the gap is normal, not malicious, and try again.