I always thought the Mer de Glace at the Mont Blanc illustrates this really well. You arrive and there’s a sign “the glacier was here in 1910” and that’s where tourists back then.
To get to the actual glacier, you have to eall down many flights of metal stairs for about half an hour and there’s several signs for different years, 1950, 1990, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, something like this, with the years between each sign getting shorter but the distance staying roughly the same. And from the top it’s really far away.
Of course, once you actually reach the glacier, you get to the main attraction, a 3m diameter tunnel they bored 100m deep into it as a tourist attraction with ice sculptures inside. Above the tunnel you can see the remains of the tunnel from the previous year, half melted…
There was a recent paper that argues ‘bullshitting’ is the most apt analogy. I.e. telling something to satisfy the other person without caring about the truth content of what you say