There’s also motivated obfuscation. If you want to see one of the most ridiculous examples, take a look at The Boston Housing Dataset | Kaggle The independent variable is:
MEDV: Median value of owner-occupied homes in $1000’s
…and one of the predictors is
B: 1000(Bk - 0.63)^2 where Bk is the proportion of blacks by town
Why do you think they didn’t use Bk directly?