The error that you know where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.
One form of this is “teaching birds how to fly,” where Taleb points out that a Harvard ornithological department could explain the mathematics of flight and how birds wings work, but the birds do not need to understand that in order to fly.
Taleb also argues against the “master pupil” relationships, arguing that those relationships developed because the people were like minded, not that they became like minded because of the relationship. A personal note on this: I’ve come to believe more and more that the right book and idea is not about completely teaching you something new, rather, helping you fully articulate something you have already begun to think about.