Uhm, maybe I actually don't understand the poem. I'll read it over again.
EDIT: I still get the same message from the repeated lines, that the complex systems behind the surface can't be beautiful, and are somehow innately terrible.
To clarify why I liked it, I find comfort in the fact that someone else has thought about the same existentially terrifying things as me. (I read the beauty-terrible complaint as one of the nature of nature, rather than of something we can change.) So when I think about such things, I'm less likely to feel quite as alone if I recall this poetry. Somehow reading other people's prose on the subject doesn't strike the same effect as poetry.
It [the poem] might not relate to consequentialist thinking that easily, but I found it a good antidote to the negative e...
The poem is from someone whose online pseudonym is atiguhya padma. I'll quote the first verse, the refrain, and the beginning of the second verse to give you enough flavor to decide if you want to follow the link. There are about 9 verses total.
Reductionist thinking can connect emotions triggered by the surfaces encountered in daily life to a larger set of concepts and predictions, and this seems to have consequences for both the thinking and the emotions that isn't often discussed and is even less often discussed well. I liked the poem because it addressed the issues pretty well and in an emotional mode, which is doubly rare.
The "no beautiful surfaces" refrain is a quote from Nietzsche which has little easily accessed online scholarship. Nothing in the first few pages of google results mentions a source for the quote so I was suspicious at first that it was even a quote by him, but references available via google books indicate that it comes from one of his notebooks. I haven't tracked down the notebook (it doesn't seem to be in gutenberg), so I'm not sure if the original source carries the specific connotations the poem attributes to the phrase, or if it is just a cool line put to good use in a new context.