[wes-exp]

It sounds like what you're describing is not figuring out at a high level what to do, but formalizing that into low-level instructions for a computer. This goes exactly to my point. What I meant by "algorithm design" is strategy selection, which I want to be careful to separate from strategy formalization for a computer. It is the latter that I think laypeople struggle with the most, however, the fascination with algorithms often drives attention to the former. For example, it's easy to be impressed by the cleverness of binary search, but it's actually relatively straightforward to understand as a high-level concept. The harder thing for a layperson is to formalize binary search into a working set of computer steps. I think there is a certain cognitive bias at play, where the formality of fine detail seems lowly and menial, so we want to skip over it, in spite of the fact that it's actually the biggest hurdle for most people to overcome.