I initially thought the author was being sarcastic, but the next few lines suggest he was serious. There's a really easy way to change the OSX setting (and I do this on every mac I use):
System Preferences -> Mouse -> Scroll & Zoom -> uncheck "Scroll direction"
in fact I only ever used them because of the novelty but when I found everything ten times harder to do because I couldn't use my shortcuts and the UI was totally different from what I was used to I avoided them)
but the first thing I did after realizing that OS X messes with scrolling was change it so it made sense. no googling was required, I just checked out the Sys Preferences like you suggest.
For now, I've given up on Linux on the desktop. I even liked Unity, except for how slow it was, but after trying Windows 8 (first Windows since W95!), I've switched for desktop use. Maybe I'll swap out my Air for a Chromebook Pixel. ;)