it seems like it's taken you four posts to say "Philosophers are confused about meta-ethics, often because they spend a lot of time disputing defintions."

No, he said quite a lot more. E.g. why philosophers do that, why it is a bad thing, and what to do about it if we don't want to fall into the same trap. This is all neccessary ground work for his final argument.

If the state of metaethics were such that most people would already agree on these fundamentals then you would have a point, but lukeprog's premise is that it's not.

I admit it's not very fun for LW regulars, but a few relatively short and simple posts is probably the bare minimum you can get away with while still potentially appealing to bright philosopher or academic types, who will be way more hesitant than your typical contrarian to dismiss an entire field of philosophy as not even wrong. I think Luke's doing a decent job of making his posts just barely accessible/interesting to a very wide audience.

Seeing as lots of people seemed to benefit even from the 'What is Metaethics' post, I'm not too worried that LW regulars won't learn much from a few of the posts in this series. If you already grok 'Austere Metaethics', then you'll have to wait a few posts for things to get interesting. :)